Smartphones are to surveillance today as tele-screens were to surveillance in George Orwell’s 1984. In Nora Young’s book The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us she writes about the tremendous amounts of self-tracking we partake in and how the vast amounts of data we generate in doing so can help us not only to understand ourselves better but also be of use to the greater good of society. However, she also highlights the dangers of over sharing our personal data online by discussing consequences such as our data being used against us, bias in data and big brother like dystopian surveillance.
Two key points that she makes in the book are that by generating so much data of ourselves through self-tracking and creating a digital persona of ourselves online we face the risk of losing touch with the reality of the physical world around us and although big data can have many positive outcomes for society in many fields, privacy and the right of ownership issues to that information are still lingering concerns that must be resolved first for that data to be truly beneficial to everyone in society.
What Young (2013) explains from the fourth chapter of the book “we need to make space for that which cannot be statistically documented: inchoate, subjective, embodied experience” (94) represents what is problematic with the online representation of the self and self-tracking in general. Aside from all privacy issues and data ownership issues associated with self-tracking and self-generated data all of the online activities we partake in from changing our Facebook profile picture to updating our Twitter feed takes away a lot of the time that could better be used to get in touch with the real physical world and people around us. Young writes about the concept of data exhaust, examples of which includes Facebook posts and profile status updates that carries no meaning for most people other than one’s closest associates. Often times whether it be on the bus or on the street people around me are immersed in their digital devices be it a smartphone or a tablet either communicating with others or documenting some part of their life. What I observe is that they are detaching and limiting themselves from the physical world around them and living their life through a digital frame. The perfect example of being detached from the physical world is when someone is taking a picture of an event they are in such as a concert. They are not living in the real world frame of just simply experiencing the concert with their senses; rather they are documenting their experience by taking a picture or video through the phone to enjoy later. They have less time to interact with the real grounded physical world around and I believe, like the author, that they should have more space that is not documented and is a subjective and embodied experience.
Young (2013) mentions that with all the self-knowledge we have and the emergence of smart cities we may never have any flâneurs, which are “people who stroll the streets of the modern city without a goal beyond discovering the world around them” (158). This is again the result of self tracking and learning through big data. While it is convenient and useful to know our built environments intimately I feel there still is something special with the unknown, the subjective and the mysterious city. With a background in human geography I have read works of geographers of the past describing the effects of the city on one’s mentality and state of mind and I am interested in how the life would be like if we did not have any information about our surroundings at all.
Overall the book does a great job at highlighting the benefits and drawbacks of self-tracking by examining the ways that our personal data and our usage habits can be used for the good of society or the evils of corporate profit. There is no doubt that our “data maps” can provide valuable insights into how we can better our lives. At the same time we are reminded that if we immerse ourselves too deeply into the virtual world we can distance ourselves from the real world around us and lose track of reality and who we are. As the author mentions in the last two chapters of the book we are in the early stages of the digital information age and we must work hard as “data activists” to define the rules and laws that govern our data. If we fail to do so we may find ourselves in an Orwellian society.
References
Young, N. (2013). The virtual self: How our digital lives are altering the world around us. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.