techish

Self-Tracking as a Dialogue Between the Virtual and Physical Self

Tracking your bike ride to work using GPS or snapping a photo of each meal you eat and uploading them to a blog are just a couple of the wonders that technology has made possible - and they’re so common, we tend not to even think how the data trails they create affect us.

Is it possible that these self-tracking practices are a modernized version of diary keeping? An external vantage point from which to understand ourselves? A way to align ourselves more fully with machines? Or a way to exert our identity amidst a relentless flow of data?

CBC Radio journalist Nora Young explores these questions in her book The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us.

Young provides a well-researched and thought-provoking look into the emerging world of self-tracking. She grounds the discussion in past practices such as Benjamin Franklin’s notebook in which he rated his success in meeting “virtues” such as temperance, frugality, sincerity and justice - though only one at a time. Or earlier in the “spiritual diaries” which were very popular during in 17th and 18th century England and France where people would strive for an objective record of their spiritual life in order to bring the self closer to God.

Seen in these terms, the goal of self-tracking can be thought of - at its best - as a way to keep on track to meet goals, providing gold stars along the way. At its worst, it’s a reminder that every missed workout, night of binge TV watching, and, indeed, sin in being observed through the Panopticonic lens of the smartphone.

Young explains that self-tracking can be a record of change that helps in “documenting the self into being.” For instance, a teenager will document her throughs in a private journal and read them later to see a record of emotional states as she grows into adulthood. “It is a way of creating and reinforcing a self that has substance, a history, and, most importantly, physicality,” she writes.

Indeed, while the digital world threatens to make our physical bodies obsolete (or for the techno-utopians - free from our fleshy prisons), self-tracking, in essence, re-asserts the self in terms - data, maps, infographics - that give the body and the self to take up space in the digital world.

As a side note, observers saw a different but similar reaction to the increasingly virtual world of the ‘90s with the return to physicality written on bodies themselves in the extreme body modifications of tattoos, piercings, and scarrings. Marshall McLuhan called the return to the body as “the discarnate effect” Mark Kingwell describes it in his book Dreams of Millennium: “When flesh is rendered virtual and personal integration is shaken, the body becomes a natural site of cultural resistance, perhaps the last meaningful place to resist electronic encroachment.”

Now, however, the capability to “hack” the body through smartphone-assisted workout routines and the mind through endurance reading groups is widespread. This has resulted in a myriad of new and different modifications.

Of course, it would be nice if we could stop the discussion at the reassertion of individuality amidst a tidal wave of data, but Young presses on, addressing the problem that someone striving to carve out an identity in the digital world will inevitably feed into a stream of information used by states and companies. While many would argue that self-tracking should be personal, there is the possibility that data (such as Canada’s Long-Form Census) provides crucial information about the conditions in which people live that could be put to good use (perhaps) as easily as it is made to target an ad or generate a sale. While the surface goal of self-tracking is to gain knowledge about the self, what emerges in the aggregate is a knowledge about society.

Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of self-tracking, Young asserts, is that the self cannot really be tracked. There’s simply no metric for personality nor a host of other traits.

But self-trackers have found ways to navigate this divide.

One self-tracker Young interviewed said he used tracking as merely a game through which he could get closer to introspection. With the realization that there are limits to which parts of him can be computed and which cannot, he said the fact that he’s listening to cues is what matters. And isn’t listening to ourselves - not just data and statistics - what creates the foundation for a self and the potential for community?