As I peer out of the Biblio Café, I am immediately drawn to the multitudes of students and faculty who roam the campus without the use of sight; so engrossed in their cellular devices, we have now adapted to a lifestyle with limited vision of our surroundings.  The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives are Altering the World Around Us by Nora Young, illustrates the world that we are absentmindedly entering into; a world that boasts all sorts of digital potential but at the cost of a private life.  Young initially creates a discourse and provokes an intriguing question for the readers; are we truly living life or just a constant stream of quantitative data?

Throughout the novel Young, author and host of CBC’s Radio channel Spark demonstrates a great interest in the culture of digitalizing our life.  Young, attributes Benjamin Franklin as a pioneer for self-tracking to create a perfect human specimen.  Although Franklin’s, ideal individual was through achieving moral perfection; he logged his behaviour in accordance to thirteen virtues and each time he sinned he marked his page with a black mark.  Eventually, Franklin arrived at his goal and was able to review his progress and marvel at his accomplishments.  During Young’s research for this novel she participated in her own version of self-tracking.  Young, tracked her online productivity with a site called Rescuetime.com, this site would monitor and create quantitative data to illustrate where she was spending most time browsing the web.  Julie Rak, a diary expert from the University of Alberta pointed out that self-tracking can be correlated with The Panopticon theory.  The Panopticon was a model of prison design; cells were positioned facing a central tower where guards were positioned to watch behaviour.  Although, prisoners would never know if they were being watched or not; this encouraged the prisoners to self-monitor and self-regulate their own behaviour.  This very model contributes to everyday individual’s behavior while they are tracking using some kind of log, be online or diary.   The notion of having someone else see your results gives you motivation to keep improving those numbers.

This book was particularly concerning and fascinating with my background in geography; social media and many Smartphone apps have enlisted geolocation based mapping as an automatic function on your digital device when posting on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc.  This has ultimately created a virtual self that not only identifies with online content; it travels the world with it.  Now when our information of location hit the online world it is categorized in what is called the Geoweb.  The Geoweb is a conglomerate of ‘tags’ at specific geographical sites that are then searchable online by location.  This foreign concept has been widely critiqued and praised.  Young remains neutral on this concept but provides adequate material from both sides of the spectrum.  First, Young brought awareness to the dangers of constantly sharing your location with strangers online; the website PleaseRobMe.com was specifically made for individuals’ urges to overshare in an unknown community.  PleaseRobMe.com extracted public data from the Geoweb and effectively shed light on the fact that when you are publishing your whereabouts this automatically suggests you are not at home.  However, where there are pitfalls there are also benefits.  Young highlighted a news story in Portland, Oregon that successfully used geographical locations from twitter to locate a pipe bomb that had exploded in a park.  Citizens who commented on twitter about hearing a big boom were asked to rate the noise level; eventually creating a data map that directed police to the park.  This ultimately led me to do some further research into the usability of twitter for an abundant Geoweb.   Author Mark Graham compiled Twitter data for his journal article; Mapping the geoweb: a geography of Twitter.  Similarly to Young, Graham denotes our society as an ever evolving digitalized atmosphere and that social media has become fundamental for many individuals.  Graham and his team of researchers chose to gather georeferenced tweets to create a data map of the trails that users were revealing over social media.  I found it intriguing that through the span of seven days only 1% of Twitter users were disclosing their locations (Graham, 2013).  This statistic was surprising to me as  Young’s book indicated that the geographical data left behind by users was vast and that we should become more conscious of what we put out into the world.  Regardless, I agree with raising public awareness and encouraging social media users to consciously understand how their data map may be treated or misused.

Overall, I found Nora Young’s novel The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives are Altering the World Around Us, overly relatable and in some ways eye opening for a Smartphone and social media user.   Although, I am not an avid self-tracker I do understand the process and the obsession to see your life progress with hopes of self-improvement.  To look back on the record of your achievements and journeys; both physically and emotionally that have molded me into the person I am.