The Quantified Self Movement is not a Kleenex
March 26th, 2013, by Dawn Nafus § 9 Comments
by Dawn Nafus and Jamie Sherman
The Quantified Self (QS) is a global movement of people who numerically track their bodies. If you were to read popular press accounts like this, this and this, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was a self-absorbed technical elite who used arsenals of gadgets to enact a kind of self-imposed panopticon, generating data for data’s sake. Articles like this could easily make us believe that this group unquestioningly accepts the authority of numerical data in all circumstances (a myth nicely debunked here). Kanyi Maqubela sees a lack of diversity in “the quantified self.” On one hand, he is absolutely right to say that developing technologies to get upper middle class people who do yoga and shop at farmers markets to “control their behavior” is a spectacular misrecognition of the actual social problem at hand,[1] and one that can be attributed directly to the design-for-me methodology[2] so rampant in Silicon Valley. The charge works, however, only if we think about Quantified Self as if it were analogous to Kleenex:[3] a brand name that can be used generically for the latest round of health and fitness gadgets technologies whose social significance (or lack thereof) is self-evident.
The Quantified Self that we have come to know is not a Kleenex. It is a particular social movement with specific social dynamics, people and practices. Even the most cursory ethnographic examination of actual practices of its members reveals a very different picture. We have been conducting this research for the past year and a half, alongside many other academics who have also been welcomed into the community. The Quantified Self that we know has very little to do with trying to control other people’s body size or fetishizing technology. Indeed, people who use pen and paper are community leaders alongside professional data analysts. As a social movement, QS maintains a big tent policy, such that the health care technology companies who do try to control other people’s body sizes also participate. But QS organizes its communities in ways that require people to participate as individuals with personal experiences, not as companies with a demo to sell. This relentless focus on the self we suspect does have cultural roots in neoliberalism and the practices of responsibilization Giddens identified so long ago, but it also does important cultural work in the context of big data.
An example from our ethnography can illustrate this. At a recent Quantified Self meeting on the West Coast, discussion turned to “habit formation.” Sean, one of the organizers of the group, was talking about his frustration with tracking apps organized around “streaks.” He felt great to have kept his new “habit” seventy times in a row, but “when your mother gets ill and you miss a week, poof! It’s gone.” He was looking for something that would offer a metric for what he called the “strength” of a habit. He felt that would be much more encouraging for him: after all, the habit does not just go away because the data does. Other participants mentioned various kinds of moving averages that would be nice, and the conversation wandered into a debate over whether “habits” was a negative framework to use, and whether “practices” were more constructive.
Later in the evening, two men, David and Tom, were talking about Tom’s recent purchase of a Jawbone Up—one of many devices that will track movements and infer various things from them, like sleep or exercise. Tom showed us the visualization of his sleep data that appeared to show that he falls asleep quite quickly most nights. That information was encouraging as he had been concerned about his sleep. While he was not entirely certain how the bracelet-style device measured sleep cycles, he conjectured that it must have to do with motion. In any case, he felt like he was more rested just knowing that “in fact” he was sleeping well. The group laughed, and then continued to wonder collectively about just how the thing “decided” what sleep cycle you were in. Discussion turned to other devices that incorporated other indicators like skin temperature, perspiration, heart rate and brainwaves. A certain watch had all the sensors David wanted. He could use it for more than just sleep tracking, but it had limits. He knew the watch could track his heart rate, but he wanted to see the variability of his heart rate because he had been curious about the physical expression of moods. The watch only gave a pulse, as if there were no other interpretation of the underlying signals from the heart.
The relationship between “habit formation” and the limitations of devices is significant. On one hand, the habits/practices that most participants sought to instill in themselves generally (though not always) adhered to normative guidelines around health and good citizenship: exercise more, work more effectively, keep moods elevated, etc. On the other hand, these clearly are not passive consumers swallowing blindly the parameters of “what’s good for them.” In many ways they see their activities as a response to big data and big science dictums that make claims about the healthy body from on high. In the face of generalized, anonymous one-size-fits-all prescriptions derived from population studies, they seek to understand what is right for me. What is the optimal bedtime for me? Under what diet regime do I feel my best? What activities (sleep, caffeine, wheat, dairy, and other usual suspects) are particularly correlated with mood or energy in my life?
If people in this movement appear narcissistic on the surface, it is because of their focus on the self. The insistence on the agency of each person to track, understand, and decide for themselves what is right “for them” does draw on cultural threads of individualism, but they do it in ways that refrain from making assumptions about what is right for others. While the self is the site of internalization of dominant big data visions that do control people in Foucauldian, biopolitical ways,[4] here it is also, at the same time, a means of resistance. QSers self-track in an effort to re-assert dominion over their bodies by taking control of the data that many of us produce simply by being part of a digitally interconnected world. When participants cycle through multiple devices, it is often not because they fetishize the technology, but because they have a more expansive, emergent notion of the self that does not settle easily into the assumptions built into any single measurement. They do this using the technical tools available, but critically rather than blindly. It is not radical to be sure, but a soft resistance, one that draws on and participates in the cultural resources available.
The eagerness with which pundits seize on the Quantified Self as a generic brand, a Kleenex style term to toss around, speaks to the ways that QS practices cohere with current ideologies and practices of self in the mainstream. Yet to stop there, to overlook the particulars of what actual QSers do, how they do it and why, is to miss the social significance of the Quantified Self as a movement. It is not the nerdy devices they enthuse over, nor the sometimes mundane self-transformations they seek to achieve, but the explicitness with which they confront the question of what the cultural dominance of data means for me. Answering this question requires a critical and questioning point of view. Within Quantified Self, like snowflakes, no two tissues are alike: now, how do we count that?
[1] Greenhalgh, S. 2012. “Weighty subjects: The biopolitics of the U.S. war on fat.” American Ethnologist, 39:3, pp. 471-487
[2] Oudshoorn, N., Rommes, E., & Stienstra, M. 2004. Configuring the user as everybody: Gender and design cultures in information and communication technologies. Science, Technology & Human Values, 29(1), 30-63
[3] Ken anderson pointed out the Kleenex comparison to us.
[4] Cheney-Lippold, J. 2011. A new algorithmic identity : Soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. Theory, Culture & Society, 28, 164-181.
Call for Papers: “Big Data, Big Questions, or, Accounting for Big Data” [Abstracts DUE October 1, 2012]
January 22nd, 2013, by admin Comments Off
From Kate Crawford and Mary Gray at Microsoft Research, a call for papers on Big Data:
“Big Data, Big Questions, or, Accounting for Big Data”
International Journal of Communication
Guest Editors:
Kate Crawford
Microsoft Research
University of New South Wales
Mary L. Gray
Microsoft Research
Indiana University
Editor:
Larry Gross
University of Southern California
Previously isolated data sets, from social media and demographic surveys to city maps and urban planning documents, are now routinely interlinked. Combining separate, often disparate, multi-terabyte sets of information reframes our capacity to see into the behaviors of – and relationships between – people, institutions and things. Researchers in fields as varied as computer science, geography, sociology, marketing, biology, economics, among many others, use the term “big data” to capture a wide range of activities revolving around accessing and analyzing these vast quantities of information. What are the implications of big data as a cultural, technological and analytic phenomenon? What are the practices of big data, the underlying assumptions, and ways of modeling the world? Who gets access to it, and what effects does this produce?
This special section will offer a range of critical engagements with the issues surrounding big data and its related models of knowledge. We seek scholarly articles from diverse fields, and a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches: including media studies, communication, anthropology, digital humanities, computational and social sciences, cultural geography, history, and critical cultural studies.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
What is the history (or histories) of big data and its related practices?
What are the epistemological ramifications of big data?
How can computational and social sciences use big data in cross-disciplinary work?
What are the strengths and pitfalls of new hybrids?
What are the ethics of big data use, be it in city management, social media research, or political campaigning?
Who gets access to big data? What are the issues of class, race, gender, sexuality, religion and geography?
What are the labour politics of big data research?
The International Journal of Communication is an open access journal. All accepted articles will be published online. The anticipated publication date for this Special Section is August 2013.
Manuscripts should conform to the IJoC author guidelines.
Send your abstract, title of your paper and a list of five potential reviewers with their titles and e-mail addresses by October 1, 2012 to IJOCbigdata@gmail.com. Your suggested reviewers will help streamline the peer-review process.
If you have any questions, please contact Kate Crawford at kate@microsoft.com or Mary L. Gray at mLg@microsoft.com.
Dealing with Big Data: David Hakken Weighs In
January 15th, 2013, by Patricia G. Lange Comments Off
Although anthropologists have been working with large-scale data sets for quite some time, the term “big data” is currently being used to refer to large, complex sets of data combined from different sources and media that are difficult to wrangle using standard coding schemes or desktop database software. Last year saw a rise in STS approaches that try to grapple with questions of scale in research, and the trend toward data accumulation seems to be continuing unabated. According to IBM, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. This means that 90% of the data in the world was created during the last 2 years.
Big data are often drawn and aggregated from a very large variety of sources, both personal and public, and include everything from social media participation to surveillance footage to consumer buying patterns. Big data sets exhibit complex relationships and yield information to entities who may mine highly personal information in a variety of unpredictable and even potentially violative ways.
The rise of such data sets yields many questions for anthropologists and other researchers interested both in using such data and investigating the techno-cultural implications and ethics of how such data is collected, disseminated, and used by unknown others for public and private purposes. Researchers have called this phenomenon the “politics of the algorithm,” and have called for ways to collect and share big data sets as well as to discuss the implications of their existence.
I asked David Hakken to respond to this issue by answering questions about the direction that big data and associated research frameworks are headed. David is currently directing a Social Informatics (SI) Group in the School of Informatics and Computing (SoIC) at Indiana University Bloomington. Explicitly oriented to the field of Science, Technology, and Society studies, David and his group are developing a notion of social robustness, which calls for developers and designers to take responsibility for the creation and implications of techno-cultural objects, devices, software, and systems. The CASTAC Blog is interested in providing a forum to exchange ideas on the subject of Big Data, in an era in which it seems impossible to return to data innocence.
Patricia: How do you define “big data”?
David: I would add three, essentially epistemological, points to your discussion above. The first is to make explicit how “Big Data” are intimately associated with computing; indeed, the notion that they are a separate species of data is connected to the idea that they are generated more or less “automatically,” as traces normally a part of mediation by computing. Such data are “big” in the sense that they are generated at a much higher rate than are those large-scale, purpose-collected sets that you refer to initially.
The second point is the existence of a parallel phenomenon, “Data Science,” which is a term used in computing circles to refer to a preferred response to “Big Data.” Just as we have had large data sets before Big Data, so we have had formal procedures for dealing with any data. The new claim is that Big Data has such unique properties that it demands its own new Data Science. Also part of the claim is that new procedures, interestingly often referred to as “data mining.” will be the ones characteristic of Data Science. (What are interesting to me are the rank empiricist implications of “data mining.”) Every computing school of which I know is in the process of figuring out how to deal with/“capitalize” on the Data Science opportunity.
The third point is the frequently-made claim that the two together, Big Data and Data Science, provide unique opportunities to study human behavior. Such claims become more than annoying for me when it is asserted that the Big Data/Data Sciences uniquenesses are such that those pursuing them need not pay any attention to any previous attempt to understand human behavior, that only they and they alone are capable of placing the study of human behavior on truly “scientific” footing, again because of their unique scale.
Patricia: Do you think that anthropologists and other researchers should use big data, for instance, using large-scale, global information mined from Twitter or Facebook? Do you view this as “covert research”?
David: We should have the same basic concern about these as we would any other sources of data: Were they gathered with the informed consent of those whose activities created the traces in the first place? Many of the social media sites, game hosts, etc., include permission to gather data as one of their terms of service, to which users agree when they access the site. This situation makes it hard to argue that collection of such data are “covert.” Of course, when such agreement has not been given, any gathered data in my view should not be used.
In the experience of my colleagues, the research problem is not so much the ethical one to which you refer so much as its opposite—that the commercial holders of the Big Data will not allow independent researchers access to it. This situation has led some colleagues to “creative” approaches to gathering big data that have caused some serious problems for my University’s Institutional Review Board.
In sum, I would say that there are ethical issues here that I don’t feel I understand well enough to take a firm position. I would in any particular case begin with whether it makes any sense to use these data to answer the research questions being asked.
Patricia: Who “owns” big data, and how can its owners be held accountable for its integrity and ethical use?
David: I would say that the working assumption of the researchers with whom I am familiar is either the business whose software gathers the traces or the researcher who is able to get users to use their data gathering tool, rather than the users themselves. I take it as a fair point that such data are different from, say, the personal demographic or credit card data that are arguably owned by the individual with whom they are associated. The dangers of selling or similar commercial use of these latter data are legion and clear; of the former, less clear to me, mostly because I don’t know enough about them.
Patricia: What new insights are yielded by the ability to collect and manipulate multi-terrabyte data sets?
David: This is where I am most skeptical. I can see how data on the moves typically made by players in a massive, multiplayer, online game (MMOG) like World of Warcraft ™ would be of interest to an organization that wants to make money building games, and I can see how an argument could be made that analysis of such data could lead to better games and thus be arguably in the interest of the gamers. When it comes to broader implications, say about typical human behavior in general, however, what can be inferred is much more difficult to say. There remain serious sampling issues however big the data set, since the behaviors whose traces are gathered are in no sense that I can see likely to be randomly representative of the population at large. Equally important is a point made repeatedly by my colleague John Paolillo, that the traces gathered are very difficult to use directly in any meaningful sense; that they have to be substantially “cleaned,” and that the principles of such cleaning are difficult to articulate. Paolillo works on Open Source games, where issues of ownership are less salient that they would be in the proprietary games and other software of more general interest.
Equally important: These behavioral traces are generated by activities executed in response to particular stimulations designed into the software. Such stimuli are most likely not typical of those to which humans respond; this is the essence of a technology. How they can be used to make inferences about human behavior in general is beyond my ken.
Let me illustrate in terms of some of my current research on MMOGs. Via game play ethnography, my co-authors (Shad Gross, Nic True) and I arrived at a tripartite basic typology of game moves: those essentially compelled by the physics engine which rendered the game space/time, those responsive to the specific features designed into the game by its developers, and those likely to be based on some analogy with “real life” imported by the player into the game. As the first two are clearly not “normal,” while the third is, we argue that games could be ranked in terms of the ratio between the third and the first two, such ratio constituting an initial indicator of the extent of familiarity with “real life” that could conceivably be inferred from game behavior. Perhaps more important, the kinds of traces to be gathered from play could be changed to help make measures like this easier to develop.
Patricia: What are the epistemological ramifications of big data? Does its existence change what we mean by “knowledge” about behavior and experience in the social sciences?
David: I have already had a stab at the first question. To be explicit about the second: I don’t think so. There are no fundamental knowledge alterations regarding those computer mediations of common human activity, and we don’t know what kind of knowledge is contained in manipulations of data traces generated in response to abnormal, technology-mediated stimuli.
Patricia: boyd and Crawford (2011) argue that asymmetrical access to data creates a new digital divide. What happens when researchers employed for Facebook or Google obtain access to data that is not available to researchers worldwide?
David: I find their argument technically correct, but, as above, I’m not sure how important its implications are. I am reminded of a to-remain-unnamed NSF program officer who once pointed out to a panel on which I served that NSF was unlikely to be asked to fund the really cutting edge research, as this was likely to be done as a closely guarded, corporate secrete.
Patricia: What new skills will researchers need to collect, parse, and analyze big data?
David: This is interesting. When TAing the PhD data analysis course way back in the 1970s, I argued that to take random strolls through data sets in hopes of stumbling on a statistically significant correlation was bad practice, yet this is in my understanding, the approach in “data mining.” We argue in our game research that ethnography can be used to identify the kinds of questions worth asking and thus give a focus, even foster hypothesis testing, as an alternative to such rampant empiricism. Only when such questions are taken seriously will it be possible to articulate what new skills of data analysis are likely to be needed.
Patricia: How can researchers insure data integrity across such mind-boggling large and diverse sets of information?
David: Difficult question if dealing with proprietary software; as with election software, “trust me” is not enough. This is why I have where possible encouraged study of Open Source Projects, like that of Giacomo Poderi in Trento, Italy. Here, at least, the goals of designers and researchers should be aligned.
Patricia: To some extent, anthropologists and other qualitative researchers have always struggled to have their findings respected among colleagues who work with quantitative samples of large-scale data sets. Qualitative approaches seem especially under fire in an era of Big Data. As we move forward, what is/will be the role and importance of qualitative studies in these areas?
David: As I suggested above, in my experience, much of the Data Science research is epistemologically blind. Ethnography can be used to give it some sight. By and large, however, my Data Science colleagues have not found it necessary to respond positively to my offers of collaboration, nor do I think it likely that either their research communities of funders like the NSF, a big pusher for Data Science, will push them toward collaboration with us any time soon.
Patricia: What does the future hold for dealing with “big data,” and where do we go from here?
David: I think we keep asking our questions and turn to Big Data when we can find reason to think that they can help us answer them. I see no reason to jump on the BD/DS bandwagon any time soon.
On behalf of The CASTAC Blog, please join me in thanking David Hakken for contributing his insights into a challenging new area of social science research!
Patricia G. Lange
Editor-in-Chief
The CASTAC Blog
