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?

Facebook, Twitter, and online forms are sites we use everyday to the point it becomes part of our lives. But, at the same time we take them for granted. In the book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger discusses about the importance of forgetting and that without the ability to forget, consequences can occur. This book also allows the audience to look at the way technology has changed how we remember and forget information and, how there are ways that can help to re-integrate forgetting into the digital world. However, the most important concept is about forgetting. In order to look into this concept further, there needs to be an understanding of why this is important and how it affects us in our daily lives. The concept of forgetting has changed in the digital age but according to the author, there are steps to ensure we will remember how to forget in the digital age. (Mayer-Schönberger ,15) The importance of deleting is necessary to prevent ourselves from going into a path of ignorance and regret.

In the book, Mayer-Schönberger makes the argument about why forgetting is important in the digital age. He discusses about how with digital media becoming prominent in remembering our information, we need to be careful with what we decide to have out on the Internet. In my opinion on the concept of forgetting, I agree with the author’s argument that forgetting is an important concept to understand in the digital age. While we are constantly putting information out on the Internet, we tend to forget that the Internet will save whatever information that is posted and, will not remove them from their digital storage. An example given in the book was how a student would not be able to become a teacher due to a Facebook picture of herself as a “drunken pirate.” (Mayer-Schönberger, 1) Even though this example shows how pictures are saved for people to see, it does not discuss about comments or posts one can make. For users of Twitter, many people assume that they are able to post whatever they think is appropriate. However, many do not realize that even if they are able to delete their tweets, users are capable of sending these tweets to employers or shame the person for writing inappropriate content. This example is used as a reason why forgetting is important. He also discusses about how not only is it necessary in the digital age, but in our physical selves. Without forgetting, we would have many memories of our past. However, we would be constantly thinking about the past if we did not forget. As a result, we would continue to think about the past instead of moving forward with the future. Forgetting is important for us in reality and the digital age.

The author gives points as to how we can resolve the problems remembering data has while at the same time, re-implementing forgetting. One of the solutions included expiration of information. By doing so, personal information on some sites will be removed after a certain amount of time. While I do agree that we need to re-implement forgetting, we need to address the need to implement common sense before giving out our information. Even if the solutions he mention work, it does not change the perception of the personal and the private sphere of the digital age. With digital media, it is easier to post messages or pictures of content that you would not be proud of sharing in reality, but would be comfortable sharing online. For example, I have seen photos on Facebook of people that are questionable content and may get them in trouble. It is apparent that people do believe that they can write and post whatever they feel is acceptable under Free Speech. However, they do not realize that even if they believe that their accounts are private, this information is spread throughout the Internet and can never be removed. So, while solutions may exist to allow forgetting in the digital age, it does not change how many act or think.

While the digital age has become more prominent, we need to understand that we live in a society that will not forget. While he Internet can store all our personal information, it can store information of us that we do not want others to see as well. At the same time, we need to use common sense. That way, we prevent ourselves from giving unwanted information to this digital storage. In the end, forgetting and using common sense is necessary or we will pay the consequences.

Bibliography

Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.      Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. Print.

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, a book by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, is all about how digital technology does not have the capability of forgetting, which for some people can bring about certain consequences. Even though it is clear after reading this book that Viktor is very knowledgeable about the history of digital technology, the science behind forgetting and especially knowledgeable about how to combat the challenge of forgetting in this digital age, his argument is not complete. He mentions that “we can respond to the shadow of digital remembering employing a variety of different means” (Mayer- Schönberger p198), and he even describes these possible means in the book, but his argument is lacking information on how to teach younger generations about their Internet hygiene, and this could be a step towards forgetting in this digital age.

In the first part of the book Viktor provides a background to the consequences of digital technology not being able to forget. He does this by providing a story about a woman, who was on the path of becoming a teacher when her university officials denied her of her teaching certificate because “her behavior was unbecoming of a teacher” (Mayer- Schönberger p1). This was because of one of her Myspace pictures she posted of herself in a pirate costume drinking out of a plastic cup, which the university officials obviously presumed was alcohol. This story provides the premise of the book because it is a recent example of what consequences can happen if you share something on the Internet that cannot be forgotten.

In the third section Viktor talks about there being four main technological drivers that have facilitated a shift from analog to digital in our world. The first driver he describes is digitization. It is because everyone’s world in our society is controlled by digitization. We all have some sort of digital device that we use on a daily basis. Photos are now taken digitally, etc. The other three drivers are cheap storage, easy retrieval and global reach.

In the next section Viktor talks about the consequences of not being able to forget in our digital world. He mentions, “with the help of digital tools we- individually and as a society- have begun to unlearn forgetting, to erase from our daily practices one of the most fundamental behavioral mechanisms of human kind” (Mayer- Schönberger p92). This means that we used to be able to forget easily, but with the invention of digital tools that notion has become obsolete and it is causing us more harm than good.

Viktor goes on to describe potential ways to fix or prevent those consequences from happening. Those ways are by using digital abstinence, by using information privacy rights on websites, or by adjusting and really thinking about what you are going to share on the Internet. And in the very last section Viktor talks about reintroducing forgetting and how that can help Internet users to not have to suffer through any more consequences.

As much as it is obvious that Viktor is very knowledgeable about everything he talks about in his book, he is lacking one very important concept. This concept is that older generations have to teach the younger generations, who are starting to use the Internet, about Internet hygiene and what it means to really think about their Internet identity and to think about what to post publicly or not to post online. This needs to be taught by parents to their children because the Internet “provides new modes of social presentation and positioning, new media for expression, and new ways of narrating the self” (Kirmayer, Raikhel & Rahimi, 2013) and if young generations are not taught how to properly use the Internet it could ruin their lives, like the story that Viktor provides in his book.

I really believe that teaching the younger generations about their Internet hygiene could be progress to forgetting in this digital age, or not having to forget because Internet users are not sharing things that could potentially ruin their lives. This is because from a young age when my family first got the Internet my parents taught me about Internet hygiene. One of the main things they taught me was that anyone in the world at any time can take a screenshot of something I’ve shared on a social media site, for instance, and they can keep it forever. They really instilled in me that nothing is ever properly, one hundred percent deleted from the Internet.

Reading Viktor’s book was really good insight into the history, science and future of forgetting in this digital age. However, it lacked due to not having any information about the young generations in our world that are just starting to use the internet and what we can teach them about Internet hygiene.

BIBLIOGRPAHY

Journal Article:

Kirmayer, L., Raikhel, E., & Rahimi, S. (2013). Cultures of the Internet: Identity, community and mental health. Transcultural Psychiatry, 50(2), 165-191.

Novel:

Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2009). Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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.

In The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us, Nora Young explores the concept of self-tracking, and how technology is changing the way people track and register information. Using examples that range from Benjamin Franklin’s journal entries to the social media posts that helped pinpoint the location of a pipe-bomb in 2010, Young identifies different methods of self-tracking that increase self-awareness and make people more accountable for the way they spend their time.

One thread of this self-tracking relates to weight management. As Young explains, “the Web is rich with services to help us lose weight and stay fit through recording our diet and exercises” (16). This is critical technology considering Canada’s ever expanding waistband. With over 20% of females and over 40% of males self-identifying as overweight in a 2011 Statistics Canada analysis, we can use all the help we can get.

In The Virtual Self, Young identifies several technologies that are helping people shed pounds, such as FitBit, a small wrist monitor that tracks calories, exercise and even sleep by using 3-D motion sensors. There are also countless websites, such as FitDay.com, dedicated to giving specific information about the nutritional information for different foods in order to make it easier to keep tabs on how many calories they consume in a day.

A new trend, not mentioned by Young, is the development of apps designed to make exercise more fun. An example is the app “Zombies, Run!” that makes a workout less of a chore and more of a game. The runner’s goal is to save the lives of the people at the “base” by locating critical supplies. Using a series of dynamic radio messages interspersed with the runner’s own music, the runner is forced to randomly pick up their pace – or even sprint¬ –¬ to avoid a zombie attack. There are over 100 different missions available with the app, 40 of which are free.

Technologies like this are changing the way we look at exercise, and are making us more accountable for our behaviors. Websites like habitforge.com monitor a person’s goals, and send them daily reminders to keep them motivated.

I myself went through the process of significant weight loss. At the age of 16 I was pushing 200 pounds, and was tired of feeling self-conscious and alienated. As a competitive swimmer I exercised daily, but had a large appetite that favoured McDonald’s BLTs over fruits and vegetables. Losing weight was a difficult and lengthy process, but keeping track of my energy input and output made it easier.

At the time, I had never heard of websites to help track such things, so I relied upon “guesstimation”, adding up my own totals everyday. Over the course of eight months, through increased exercise and careful eating, I managed to lose 55 pounds, bringing me into the “normal” weight category for my height. Four years later, I have still managed to maintain my goal weight, though I did stop monitoring my diet constantly after the first year – I found it was taking away from the experience of eating. Young expresses that same concern, saying that it can feel like, “sources of bodily delight and physical expressiveness, such as running or eating a meal, are reduced to stats-driven, objectified activities.” (18) That being said, I found it a useful tool to better manage what types of food I could use to fuel my body.

Self-tracking can be particularly useful for patients trying to return to exercise after an injury. The Virtual Self discusses Carlos Rizo, who started self-tracking after a serious accident in 2006 left him in pain for several years. He began tracking as a way of recording his pain – what helped or what made it worse – but over the course of his healing process he began to use it to track his re-entry into the exercise world. Now, eight years after the accident, he tracks his calories, workouts and bike rides. The pain, thankfully, is no longer an issue.

In The Virtual Self, Young examines various uses of tracking technology, some of which could greatly improve the health of users. From the asthma inhalers that have a GPS to better monitor where flare-ups occur, to Twitter feeds that pin-point and monitor the spread of infectious diseases, there are many opportunities to advance our health through tracking technology.

I found The Virtual Self well-written and packed with historical and contemporary examples. It opened my eyes to opportunities available to me, many readily accessible through the Internet or my I-phone. Young puts it nicely, “Self-tracking is our gin. It’s an almost impulsive desire to document the actual states of being and physical presence” (83). If that’s the case, we can all drink up.

In the near future (say next week or so) America is facing an economic crisis, and yet everyone is more interested in their personal devices and getting laid. Super Sad True Love Story is about the relationship between two people, and yet the most important parts seem to be more subtle, waiting for the reader to see that there is something wrong with the book’s setting.

This book is about Lenny Abramov, 39 year old son of Russian immigrants to America. Lenny works for an agency dedicated to extending the lives of its rich clientele, yet his time is never thought to be unlimited. He meets Eunice Park, a pretty young Korean girl whom is inexplicably attracted to Lenny and his nerdy ways. They live together in America during a time of economic collapse as its Chinese creditors are at the end of their patience for the nation.

When I started reading this book last after realizing that doing a book report meant reading the book, I was determined to finish it quickly so that I could write the review. Initially I skipped over smaller details and focused only on the key details of story of Lenny. While reading this way I noticed the word apparat appearing frequently. An apparat is a personal media device similar to out smart phones. During the story it is made apparent that while this world is set in present day technology has taken an even stronger hold over humanity then it has in reality.

Technology drives this world, replacing literary artifacts known as books and the chore known as a proper conversations can easily be avoided by burying oneself into their apparat. Yet technology hasn’t helped mankind, and relying on it more and more will only make us crash harder when we find out it doesn’t work.

The agency Lenny works for has been researching nanotechnology that would repair the bodies cells and restore it to an younger state. In the end of the book enough time has passed that Lenny’s boss Josh (whom had this technology used on himself ) has discovered that the technology isn’t successful in the long term and nature will take its course on the human body. This isn’t the only time technology fails humanity. Late in the story during the rupture, when America begins to collapse, everyone’s apparat all fail at the same time and remain offline for awhile before the network is restored. Despite these obvious failures, I considered the true failure of technology to be what it did to society while their apparats were online. Throughout the book Lenny is constantly reminded of how weird he is for owning a large collection of books, which are now referred to as printed bound media artifacts. There was a really weird line were the book breaks the fourth wall and refers to you as reading the book on a screen, as to say that books have disappeared from our world as well. That’s not technically true, at the spot I was thinking of its really referring to a character in the story but it felt like it was being directed at me when I read it. Not only is reading from paper non-existent, proper social interactions have fallen by the wayside. There was a point where Lenny and Eunice were in spending time alone together and Eunice would pay more attention to her apparat then Lenny. These apparats also calculate stats on people constantly and rank them in categories like personality, fuckability, and attractiveness against other nearby people. Whenever Lenny was in a crowded social area he would check his apparat to see that he was generally ranked as one of the least attractive males in the area, unless he had his arm around his sexy young Korean girlfriend.

The usage of these apparat are an exaggerated version of how my use our phones nowadays. In addition to saving us from the harsh world of social interaction they also do pretty much everything else we’d ask of them, such as streaming the news keeping track of the collapsing economy. During the section where the apparat all go offline people are stated to be a mess without them, some not being able to live in a world without their device.

Initially I ignored all the rampant over-usage of the apparat to focus on the love story between Lenny and Eunice, though eventually the world around them became weird enough that it seemed more important then their relationship, which was doomed to failure from the beginning (that isn’t even a spoiler, its pretty much given away in the title.) Whether Gary Shteyngart meant for the world to be more important then the story is up for debate, it is the most memorable part of the book left when all is said and done.

P.S. The author for this book looks like the biggest hipster I’ve ever seen.