This week I collected data to see what clothes people who participated in class chose to wear. Continued collection of data like this could investigate to see if there is a correlation between the clothes people wear and whether or not they participate frequently in class. However, I only collected the data for Tuesday due to the workshop nature of Thursday’s class, so it will only provide a snapshot of class participation.
Tuesday, March 17:
Leg-wear
5 people wearing pants –> 6 participations
21 people wearing shorts –> 13 participations
Shirts 9 people wearing long-sleeves –> 6 participations
15 people wearing short-sleeves –> 7 participations
2 people wearing no-sleeves –> 5 participations
From the wearable technology movement discussed in Peterson’s article, to the utopian idea of “total recall” presented in Penderson’s book chapter, the storage of human experience is presented as a new movement initiated by new technologies. While we have discussed augmented memory as a possibly worrisome experience that lacks creativity and human emotion, how do we feel about photographs today?
What makes a picture meaningful?
Isn’t documenting our daily lives and experiences through IPhone pictures, Facebook or Instagram forms of augmented memory? I would say it is a way to store our experience at that moment of time. Although a photograph only captures a snapshot of that experience, most of the time it is the experience behind a picture that makes it meaningful. When looking at your favorite photo, does it bring back positive memories as well as emotion? In this case, a form of augmented memory has possibly succeeded in capturing and storing a human experience.
However, augmented memory is less successful when the experience behind the picture is less meaningful than the picture itself. If your phone was out of memory and you needed to clear some space, which pictures would you consider deleting first? You would probably delete the pictures that mean the least to you. Even though a picture is a record of your past, it’s not worth keeping if theres no emotion to back it up.
Are we remembering our experiences or just the pictures we take?
A movement towards complete augmented memory should not be feared because it is a possibility, but feared if used improperly. Augmented memory can still capture emotion, as long as emotion was present in the experience in the first place. What we must avoid is reliance on these forms of memory as the only experience of the world around us. How often do we see tourists more focused on their camera lens than the scenery around them? A photograph, or any other form of augmented memory cannot be used to replace memories and experiences if we hope for them to have any meaning to us in the future.
Towards the end of Tuesday’s class there was an argument about the utility of some of the Apple Watch’s features. The main topic of discussion was the feature allowing users to send their heartbeat to friends. Rather than making an argument addressing the potential pros and cons for this feature, I’d rather look at the progression of electronic trends and Apple’s role in setting them.
While people now may look skeptically at the apple watch and see it as an interesting and perhaps intriguing piece of technology, maybe in five years people will see the watch as an essential part of their wardrobe. Trends are extremely viral and unpredictable and if the watch is even half as successful as Apple’s recent innovations (ipod, ipad, iphone) it will become essential for a large quantity of people.
The same viral and unpredictable nature of trends can be applied to some of the more obscure features of the watch, like the heartbeat. The concept of sending selfies back and forth may have seemed foreign a decade ago but now is engrained in our culture. Perhaps in a couple of years people will be sending their heartbeats back and forth. Maybe that technology will evolve into a whole new trend. While these trends cannot be predicted, Apple will probably be leading the charge with their extremely loyal following and their ahead of the curve products. In conclusion I would say don’t sleep on the Apple watch. I would not be surprised if in a few years the Apple watch will be as commonplace as Apple’s other products.
In Augmented Memory, Digital Life, and Computers that Promise to Remember Everything, Isabel Peterson examines the implications of self-tracking to the point where you are able to recall everything that you see, hear, read write or feel. Her analysis suggests that this new form of the quantified self negates the fundamental purpose of human memory.
If we expect that human memory exists to store rather than generate reality, then humans are for information and not the other way round, a rhetoric that ultimately betrays posthuman conditions in these subtle assumptions.
Humanists would suggest that information is for humans to learn, use and wrestle with. What happens to our humanity when we exist and experience simply to recall? Is an emotion still an emotion when we only remember having it, not the way it actually felt? As this idea progresses, the functionality of the human brain diminishes and we approach a robotic society where we do rather than feel and analyze.
This begs the question that we asked at the end of class: do we need a computer to tell us how we feel? As one student asked, do I need my tinder app to tell me if I am having a good time on a date? I would argue that if we do not already know these things, then ultimately, how we feel does not matter. The readings highlight the argument that there is intrinsic value in the existence of the record for posterity. However, at this point the human condition is no longer worth reflecting on. What is the human condition without the humanity that is evident in our emotions, conflicts and questions?
The next wave of technology to hit the market and takeover the materialist minds of America has a slightly terrifying side. As the Apple Watch hits the market in the next month or so, there will be an influx of data on every person wearing an Apple Watch that Apple has access to. Apple will be able to monitor all of the wearers and have a personal look into all of their lives. This simple fact begs the question, “Is this an invasion of privacy?”
Other devices that are in their infant stages of release and popularity include the Whistle, a dog tracker, and the “Smart Nursery” from Mimo Baby that monitors an infant’s room in order to determine if its healthy, hungry, and happy. As awesome and useful that all of these new devices are, they still make me wonder whether or not they will remove part of the human element from living life. When you don’t have to ever check on your baby, because there’s a computer to do it, will you lose part of the child-parent relationship that so many people cherish today? Will we lose part of our humanity because of the advancement of these technologies?
So as awed and blown away as I am by these astounding technologies, which truly are amazing and seemingly out of the movies, I am utterly terrified of the power which they give to the companies selling them and the government, who could take advantage of them. Also I do not want to slowly lose our grip on what we have left of our humanity due to dependence on computers and gadgets.
Consumers control the market and ultimately have the power to limit the sight of “Big Brother’s eye”
I found Peterson’s title and reference to George Orwell’s 1984 both comical and clichéd. The reference to “Big Brother” is so commonly used when referring to big data because it is easily assumed that any corporation or government organization with hands on the data would automatically and instantly abuse the privilege and spy on the population. It is rarely realized that such a freedom is in fact a privilege and not a right. If us, as consumers, were so interested in privacy, we wouldn’t demand such tools.
Why is it that our Jawbone, Fitbit, Misfit, or whatever other device we use to track exercise and sleep HAS to link up with our iPhone? Obviously, the answer is shear convenience. How appealing would it be to download all of your daily data to a laptop or some other form of offline tracker? That would seem monotonous and excessive. Developers have found a way to incorporate something useful, a fitness and sleep tracker, and pair that with the thing that Americans interact with more than anything else on a daily basis, a smartphone.
All inventions come to improve or initiate efficiency in a particular activity. That is simply the nature of technology. Pederson’s idea of augmented memory also sounds extremely convenient (and dangerous, but that’s another conversation). Having the ability to remember everything I ever read, studied, or discussed would come with so many advantages. However, the fact that that information could be digitized and distribute would also frighten me. Again, such an invention would still only be optional in society, which is the beauty of a market economy. Unlike in Orwell’s dystopian society, we can control Big Brother’s market if we really desire. Unfortunately for those fearful of Big Brother’s eye, millions of fitness tracking users would agree that convenience is extremely important, thus fueling the spread of these big data mechanisms.
Should we give up our private data in order to progress our understanding of human health?
Ann Helen Petersen, in “Big Mother Is Watching You”, her article from BuzzFeed.com, highlights the rising wave of wearable tracking devices. She describes in detail, many of the new types of wearables, ranging from a simple pedometer that can track an individual’s steps throughout a day, to a type of wearable that records information while attached to a person’s dog. She also writes about some of the conversations that she had with many individuals.
By the end of her article, Petersen narrows in on the point that “the future will be quantified.” Already, many (including some individuals who have already posted on this blog) have wondered if this quantification of the future is a good idea. Should we allow our lives to controlled by machines on our wrists and in our pockets? At what point should we stop? What parts of our health, and in general, our daily lives, should we control?
“That promise of ultimate, seamless simplicity — and the happiness that supposedly accompanies it — will be too much, even for the most suspicious and privacy-conscious among us, to resist.”
At what point do we trade the loss in privacy for the seamless simplicity, and more importantly, the happiness? Presented with these facts, would we not trade a small bit of privacy for a cure to diseases like diabetes and cancer? Do we relinquish our individual information if it can help the greater good? It is possible then, that we could even be trading our idea of reality, a reality run by our own minds, for a reality run by machines, while significantly progressing our understanding of human health in the process. Is this a fair trade? That is the choice we all are going to have to make.
Anne Helen Peterson in her piece titled Big Mother is Watching You discusses the current and future implications of self-tracking wearables on our daily lives. By 2018 with over 60 million fitness trackers in use worldwide we will see the explosion of self-tracking devices. With the release of the Apple Watch we can see how self-tracking devices are transitioning into our mainstream day to day culture.. But, how will self-tracking change the way we live our lives? While self-tracking will empower individuals to improve their health and to discover things such as eczema inducers, self-tracking will also peel back the mystery of the human body. We will be able to quantify information that before was merely qualitative. For instance, instead of having the qualitative feeling that you had a good nights sleep we will be reliant on data from an app which will quantify the quality of our sleep based on our movements and breathing patterns. In a way this is excites me, but more often than not when I ponder these implications I feel as if this will undermine the importance of human emotion and feeling. Instead of deciding what feels best to us as individuals we will be reliant on what an app says is ideal for us. This reminds me of a current trend in medicine, which is the transition towards personalized medicine. In my opinion only when Quantified data is matched with our qualitative human emotions will I feel satisfied by the conclusions of self-tracking devices. If we allow it, self-tracking could easily strip us of our individuality and will undermine and doubt our own feelings about our bodies.
