Will a data-selfie boost your immune system?

Time_online

What does all our personal data add up to? Is it a boon to big data marketers helping companies mine your personal data or just a nightmare scenario for complete loss of privacy? As an artist who grew up in the tech industry and loves technology, I have thought about a future where personal data could become meaningful. Maybe all this vaguely unpleasant surveillance and data gathering about us could turn into a surprisingly insightful view of ourselves and be delivered in ways that will be irresistible. In the future I imagine human data portraits manifested from reams of personal tracking data gathered invisibly as we move thru the day. Genuine data-selfies. We are so close to gathering every possible morsel of data about us, imagine what could be possible once you owned every bit of data gathered about you. After some thought, I decided it’s more than just seeing personal data and abstract patterns of you. It’s about what these patterns will tell us about ourselves. Data collected about us will unfold a personal narrative and story to reveal a hidden part of us we are trained to ignore, a way to know ourselves and anticipate what comes next. Perhaps seeing the abstract patterns and rhythms of your self-tracking data is a short-cut to mindfulness. A quick and dirty way to boost your immune system, the benefits of meditation and self-reflection without much effort.

We describe self-tracking in Calvinist utilitarian terms using fitness and health examples, the real fuel will be the desire to understand ourselves. While social-media, Twitter and Facebook tapped into the basic emotional desire for bonding and connection to other people, the personal data phenomenon will tap into the basic emotional desire to know ourselves. To see yourself, the part of you that’s invisible to you. To understand and anticipate. Who am I?

The tyranny of tiny tasks

I wasn't expecting much from the apple watch announcement, I wore a Basis watch for 9 months and have been wearing the much cuter Android Gear from Samsung. No surprise -- sensors, batterylife, tethered to a phone, what can you do on a watchface...problems are still a cobbled mess. But, I've been looking at all the reviews with great interest this week to see the blogosphere weigh in. And this is the most insightful Seth Feigerman citing Tim Wu in a Mashable article.

"It's the productivity side, I realized after a few hours of thinking, that makes me sweat. I recalled one paragraph in particular that writer Tim Wu published last month in The New Yorker discussing the downside of "convenience technology" like the smartphone:

Our technologies may have made us prosthetic gods, yet they have somehow failed to deliver on the central promise of free time. The problem is that, as every individual task becomes easier, we demand much more of both ourselves and others. Instead of fewer difficult tasks (writing several long letters) we are left with a larger volume of small tasks (writing hundreds of emails). We have become plagued by a tyranny of tiny tasks, individually simple but collectively oppressive. And, when every task in life is easy, there remains just one profession left: multitasking.

The "tyranny of tiny tasks," as Wu called it, may only get more tyrannical if the Apple Watch draws in more developers and users, pushing the smartwatch beyond the early adopter community. Computers shifted us from writing occasional time-consuming letters to writing a mounting number of emails. Smartphones allowed us to fire off an exponentially larger number of emails as well as quicker messages through other applications."

I'm still in the studio making new works built on 'time', the way we feel time, use time and place ourselves solidly in time. Something has shifted, and we're all feeling it.