Reclaiming Conversation (11 page)

The gap between the reality of online life and how we experience it stalls our discussion of Internet privacy. Consider email. People “know” email is not private. And yet many will use email, at least sometimes, for intimate correspondence. Over decades, I have asked why. The answer is always the same: When you stare at a screen, you feel completely alone. That sense of being alone with the person to whom you are writing—as though you were the only two people in the world—often as not blocks out what you know to be true. Email can be seen; it will be stored; and then it can be seen again. The seeming ephemerality of what is on the screen masks the truth: What you write is indelible. More generally, the experience of the net undermines the reality of the net. So David continues to wander online, reflect on his tracks, and think of what he does as a kind of meditation. Until he thinks of it as a more public disclosure—and chides himself for doing something he can't quite condone.

When people are in conflict, they don't do what they advise. The wise begin to say such things as, “Only say online what you wouldn't mind having posted on a company bulletin board.” But then, the wise go on Facebook and Instagram and don't follow their own rules.

This conflict limits the possibilities of digital space as a place for self-reflection. Over time and with more knowledge of who sees it, you may want to say less on it. At the same time, every time you try a new app, you put more of yourself into it. And onto a system you no longer control. And in a new twist, your apps start to talk back to you, telling you who you are based on what you have told and shown them.

T
o celebrate its tenth birthday, Facebook used an algorithm to create a “highlights collage” that organized its members' “biggest moments” since they joined Facebook. The algorithm that created the collage took account of which posts and photos had received the most “likes” and comments. In this instance, self-reflection by algorithm struck most people as harmless fun. The author of one article about the collage notes that according to Facebook, one of his past year's “top moments” came when he posted: “Who wants to
watch the football
?”

But there was a more serious side to Facebook's curation: It got some people thinking about what was really important to them. The highlights collage became a scaffolding for a narrative and they didn't mind that Facebook had authored the first draft. Then they had a chance to revise it. One father of three printed out the “highlights reel” and talked about it with his family at breakfast. He tells me how happy he is to have that printout: “I would never have made a scrapbook that elegant! It was awesome!”

Shortly after the publication of that highlights collage, I received a letter from Sid, a man in his forties, who suffers from ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. He told me of his complicated reaction to being offered a “highlights reel” of 2013. That was the year of his diagnosis.

I sat there and stared for I don't know how long. Last year at this time I had an appointment scheduled with an orthopedist to sort out the weird things going on with my hands. Maybe I should have had a sense
of what was to come but I didn't. Months later my family's life was changed. I was diagnosed with ALS. No treatment. No cure. Good luck. At the start of 2013 I had no idea.

Sid did press the button to see Facebook's version of 2013. Not surprisingly, it did not capture what the year had meant to him. There was no helping it: The timeline “had to treat some things a bit too matter-of-factly. A picture of my son's first birthday and then a post sharing my ALS diagnosis with a
nice musical transition in between
.”

Sid begins his letter to me by suggesting that no automatic system could ever understand a life with ALS—the way that event changes the meaning of everything that came before and everything that comes after. But then, in his letter, Sid backtracks. Perhaps what Facebook offered “did capture 2013 for me.” That year had been about intolerably fast cuts. It had been about moving too quickly from the normalcy of birthday cake to a doctor's office and a death sentence. Facebook had captured this, “but it is too stark a contrast to comfortably watch. . . . I couldn't watch the video knowing that the next post in the montage might be too big of a change in gears.”

Sid's experience illustrates the complexity of using the products of algorithms to think about the self. To understand what might be really important to Sid, you needed a person who could imagine living with a terminal illness. A person might understand that too-stark contrasts would be painful. But the machine-curated images did get Sid to think about his year in a new way. Facing death is about the surreal contrast between buying balloons for a birthday party and the certainty of nonexistence. The fast cuts of the Facebook postings got Sid thinking about that.
The Facebook algorithm
wasn't written to have this effect. This is what a human being did with its results.

Reading Sid's email, I thought: It is never bad to
have a new evocative object. What matters is how we
use it.
But the objects of our lives do constrain how we tell our stories. On Facebook and Twitter, we want to tell stories that others will like, ones that will be followed. I am often told that “Twitter is my memoir; Facebook is my way of keeping a diary,” but
as Melissa's case made so clear, shared journaling, like all publishing, leaves us vulnerable to the natural desire to gratify our readers
.
And when we use devices that track our physical state to provide clues for self-understanding, we work with another constraint: We try to find a narrative that fits our numbers.

In one common way of doing things, wearable technology collects data that track such things as our heart rate, respiration, perspiration, body temperature, movement, and sleep routines. These data can go right to a display on our phones where we can use them to work toward physical self-improvement. A readout of how many steps we've taken can encourage better exercise habits. In another kind of tracking app, physiological signs are used as windows onto our psychological state.

Here, the desire to wear a tracking device responds to the same impulse that had nearly everyone in my generation buying a mood ring. The difference is that even though the ring was fun, it had no authority. The new tracking devices come with substantial authority. We develop a view of ourselves (body and mind) that is tied to what measurement tells us.

While some tracking applications use sensors to read your body
for
you, others ask
you
to report your mood
or degree of focus
or the fights you are having with your partner. Over time, there is a subtle shift. In some sense, “you” become the number of steps you walked this week compared to last. “You” become a lowered resting heart rate over the span of two months. You move to a view of self as the sum, bit by bit, of its measurable elements. Self-tracking does not logically imply a machine view of self, or the reduction of self-worth to a number, but it gets people in the habit of thinking of themselves as made up of measurable units and achievements. It makes it natural to ask, “What is my score?”

In the 1980s, I wrote of the movement from the psychoanalytic to the computer culture as a shift from meaning to mechanism—from depth to surface. At that time, as computation gained ground as the dominant metaphor for describing the mind, there was a shift from thinking about the self as constituted by human language and history to seeing it as something that could be modeled in machine code.

Today's “quantified” or “algorithmic” self is certainly part of that larger story but adds something new. Instead of taking the computer as the model for a person, the quantified self goes directly to people and asks each of us to treat ourselves as though we were computational objects, subject to a printout of our ever more knowable states. The psychoanalytic self looks to history as it leaves traces in language; the algorithmic self to what it can track as data points in a time series.

N
umbers are seductive. People like thinking about themselves in terms of readouts and scores. This is not new. We have always been drawn to horoscopes, personality tests, and quizzes in magazines. Benjamin Franklin famously included a self-tracker in his autobiography, measuring himself on thirteen personal virtues every day. The difference now is that there is, as we say, “an app for that”—indeed, for all of that and more. More and more of our lives—body and soul—can be captured as data and fed back to us, analyzed by algorithm. And in the process, we are usually asked to treat ourselves and the algorithm as a black box.

We see the frustration of having a number without a narrative in Trish, twenty-one, who uses an online journaling program called 750 Words. Every day, Trish writes 750 words and the program analyzes what she has written. It compares her daily writing to what she has written before and to the universe of all the other people writing. It rates her words—or as she sees it, it rates “her”—on maturity, sexual content, on the violence in her writing and how much she uses swear words. And it gives her a reading of her preoccupations. When I talk to Trish, she is confused. One day last week, 750 Words told her that her daily writing exercise had shown her to be preoccupied with death.

Trish is a study in contrasts. A competitive athlete and a philosophy student, she wants to go to drama school when she graduates from college. She became acquainted with feedback devices when she bought a
Fitbit, a popular commercial product that provides readings on daily steps taken, calories burned, and sleep quality. From there, she became curious about programs that would give her other kinds of feedback. When I met her, she had spent six months working with 750 Words.

On the day Trish was told that she was preoccupied with death, she had used her 750 words to describe a conversation with a friend that had left her feeling misunderstood. Trish said it felt good to write it down. But then, alone with the program's readout, she felt frustrated. She didn't understand what her misunderstanding with her friend had to do with death. She
wanted to understand the algorithm
.

It's shocking that I write about death more than others. Actually, I don't mind the comparisons to the rest of the world's writing. What's hard are the comparisons to myself. It's hard not to take it personally, so it gets me thinking. The death thing is really strange. It makes me wonder why it thinks that.

What most frustrates Trish is that once the program gets her thinking, there is no place to take her thoughts or her objections. Trish says, “It's not like the program is my therapist. There isn't a relationship. I can't talk to it about why it feels that way. I don't feel that I'm thinking about death.” And even if 750 Words could tell her
which words had “triggered
” the program's reactions, she is not sure that would help. Trish wants a conversation.

Technology critic Evgeny Morozov argues the limitations of the kinds of data that Trish has been left with. A narrative has been reduced to a number. And now the number seems like a result. Morozov fears that when you have your readout from the black box, you are
tempted to stop there
. You are pleased. Or you are upset.

But as we become more sophisticated about the kinds of data that self-monitoring devices return to us, that first impulse need not be our last impulse. We can construct narratives around our numbers. Indeed, in Trish we see the impulse to do that. (“It makes me wonder why it thinks that.”) And in meetings of those who declare themselves to be
part of the “quantified self movement,” people do bring in data from sensors and programs and attempt to construct stories around them.

In this spirit, a recently divorced woman in her thirties posted a blog of self-reflection and called it “The Quantified Breakup.” In the days and months after her divorce, she tracked the number of texts she wrote and calls she made (and to whom), songs she listened to (classified happy or sad), places she went, unnecessary purchases and their costs. She tracked her sleeping and waking hours, when and for how long she exercised, ate out, and went to the movies. When did she cry in public and post on social media?

Reading this material is arresting. Yet as I read her blog, it seems like raw data for another story about what the purchases and the tears and the songs mean. Does this experience bring her back to other times when she has felt alone? To other losses?

What strategies worked then? What potential stumbling blocks can be determined from her history? What kind of support does she need? On the blog, there isn't much of this kind of talk. But we do learn that when she tried online dating and met someone she liked, they exchanged “1,146 [texts] in the first four weeks alone, an average of 40.9 per day.” And then it was over. What can we make of this? What can she? The numbers of “The Quantified Breakup” need their narrative.

I have a similar reaction to quantified self enthusiasts who have a death in the family and numerically track their period of grief with the expressed intent of not wanting to skip over any part of the mourning process. The impulse is admirable, moving. But one wonders if in tracking their grief, they keep themselves too busy to feel it. Does taking our emotional pulse and giving it a number keep us on the feeling or does it distract us because, once categorized, we have done something “constructive” with the feeling and don't have to attend to it anymore?

Does tracking mourning help us mourn or does it deflect us because if we feel we must start and end our story with a number, we limit the stories we tell?

Natasha Dow Schüll, the anthropologist, is doing an ethnographic study of the meetings of the quantitative self movement. At these
meetings, members of the movement who have been “self-tracking” stand up to tell their stories. Schüll writes: “The defining activity of QS [the quantified self movement] is its Show and Tell events, in which individual self-trackers get onstage and tell a story about what they tracked, what they learned, etcetera.” Schüll is impressed by the QS Show and Tell. She asks, “Aren't numbers
just an element in a narrative process
?”