The author of The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us, Nora Young, volunteers herself to self tracking technologies to get an inside look and experience on how they feel, may influence others, and how she is being digitally tracked. She covers a wide variety of concerns with being online, such as privacy concerns, our different identities, freedoms and sharing opportunities, legalities and data ownership, addictions or compulsive behaviours, and augmented memories.

Though her writing style is unique and easy to follow, I cannot help myself from twitching every time she is repetitive, which happens often. She often refers to data mapping, being delinked, and has inventive ways of saying ‘digital self’, ‘extended self’, ‘online doppelganger’, ‘augmented self’, ‘digital doubles,’ and so on, that are just unnecessary because she repeats her questions and statements to begin with.  She also seems to feel the need to “welcome” the readers a few times into worlds that I thought I already new existed and was apart of. They are welcomes such as, “welcome to your new digital self” (p. 78), and “welcome to the booming world of data visualization” (p. 145), that add to the repetitive nature.

She does take some facts and statistics from different corporations such as Google and Apple, and discusses some past faults that sites like Netflix and the Internet Movie Database have made in the past, but it’s still the same questions being asked as before, just address to different companies, especially on the subject of these businesses tracking users; like the iPhone tracking system she discussed halfway through the book. How much information about us is really out there? Who’s tracking it? Who has access to it? How can we avoid digital footprints? These are superfluous questions that are never fully answered. The companies and other users surely can track our posts and behaviours? And perhaps marketers? Or even the public? But maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe questions like these cannot always be entirely answered. But isn’t that the whole point of Netflix? To track our likes and dislikes to better our choice selections, suggestions and movie watching experiences? Reading through this section was what irked me the most about her redundancies. I presumed that certain brands like Netflix come with certain expectations, so it is no surprise to me that they track like they do. I wanted to hear more in depth research done about what the owners do with the information in secret; the stuff they do that is not on the surface of assumptions.

The reading of this book, however, was not all bad. It made me more appreciative of some of the extra laws—though sometimes there don’t seem to be enough—we have here in British Columbia to protect our personal privacy compared to some privacy laws—or lack there of—in some American states that do little for their citizens. It also gave me the sense that I am not alone, wondering these same questions, and that I’m not the only one guilty of having the same bad habits in respect to the online world either Young has herself or the people she talks about. There has got to be more done about creating new laws about what companies can get away with online because what may be in place doesn’t seem like enough. Like Young says, there has to be “a more robust way to protect my data than ticking ‘I agree’ to a document I barely understand…” (p 176).

We want to run our lives and our bodies like machines. But we have developed too many technologies too fast so we don’t know how to use them effectively as well as being aware of their consequences. We want to be “seen” and “heard” so badly, that we’ll blog and tweet endlessly for a simple acknowledgement of view counts or likes. We also want our devices to be our “out-board” brains and do the remembering for us.  What kind of consequences does this augmented memory system really have on us? What role does this digital tracking have on us and other societies?

The way we interact with each other is changing rapidly. We generate huge amounts of data of ourselves on social media; where we’ve been, what we ate, who we are with, what we think, what we buy, our workouts, and so on. What is it that we are choosing to report? I was still expecting her to have more answers. I wanted to know more about everybody’s consequences of online actions, and what sort of implications there might be on a more global scale. We have limitations as physical beings, but fewer limitations in having virtual knowledge and presences in the online world. Which reality would we rather live in? And with all social media has done for us, what does it really do other than fill our need for attention and news sharing? Why is it so addicting for some?