Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingel, and Tero Karppi: Our metrics, ourselves: A hundred years of self-tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device
The recent proliferation of wearable self-tracking devices intended to regulate and measure the b... more The recent proliferation of wearable self-tracking devices intended to regulate and measure the body has brought contingent questions of controlling, accessing and interpreting personal data. Given a socio-technical context in which individuals are no longer the most authoritative source on data about themselves, wearable self-tracking technologies reflect the simultaneous commodification and knowledge-making that occurs between data and bodies. In this article, we look specifically at wearable, self-tracking devices in order to set up an analytical comparison with a key historical predecessor, the weight scale. By taking two distinct cases of self-tracking – wearables and the weight scale – we can situate current discourses of big data within a historical framing of self-measurement and human subjectivity. While the advertising promises of both the weight scale and the wearable device emphasize self-knowledge and control through external measurement, the use of wearable data by multiple agents and institutions results in a lack of control over data by the user. In the production of self-knowledge, the wearable device is also making the user known to others, in a range of ways that can be both skewed and inaccurate. We look at the tensions surrounding these devices for questions of agency, practices of the body, and the use of wearable data by courtrooms and data science to enforce particular kinds of social and individual discipline.
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Papers by Tero Karppi
In 2009 leaving Facebook became a trend. Two separate art projects Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine presented digital suicide as a method to disconnect oneself from the social networking service. In this article, I approach the problem of leaving Facebook. A critical analysis of leaving Facebook and using digital suicide sites illustrates how life becomes tangled and controlled in the ubiquitous webs of network culture, and moreover how biopolitical models of capitalism are embedded in the structures and practices of exploiting the users of social networks. Theoretically this article is inspired by critical studies of digital culture.
Talks by Tero Karppi
September 22, 2011 Facebook introduced Timeline. Quite simply Timeline collects your Facebook and other online activities and shows them in your profile. Your friends will see what song you are listening to, where you are and what you do if you allow the platform to track and share your activities. According to the Facebook blog, “Now, you and your friends will finally be able to tell all the different parts of your story – from the small things you do each day to your biggest moments.”
In fact, these changes do not intrinsically seem that new. Similar activities have been shared by Facebook users all along. However what is new is the way the sharing begins to happen. While social media has been seen as a dual platform for users actively sharing content and passively providing data for corporations (Dijck 2009) we are now moving towards a digital environment that reduces the user to a passive content/data provider. Users’ information is shared by the platform automatically and autonomously without their intentional involvement. Facebook calls this ‘serendipity’ and ‘frictionless sharing’.
As a consequence, my paper argues that the Timeline entails a new, affective, turn in Facebook’s history. This affective turn cannot be reduced to a mere visual renewal of the Facebook user interface. Quite on the contrary we are witnessing a comprehensive transformation in how social networks function as cultural and political media environments.
This transformation is discussed in the context of non-subjective autonomy of an affect proposed by Brian Massumi (2002). Affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity. It is not a feeling or sensation but an ability to affect and be affected; a body’s passage from one state to another. Affection on the other hand is “each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second affecting body” (Massumi 2004, xvii). Affects are located somewhere between passivity and activity, a resonance that cannot be directed entirely to a practical end. The key here is that Massumi’s interpretation of affects allows us to understand them from a non-subjective position. We do not need to reduce affects into subjective emotions; in fact we can understand affects without the subjective involvement as potentials transmitted between both human and non-human bodies (Bennett 2010, 61).
With improvements such as serendipity and frictionless sharing Facebook is moving from a mere quantification of data into building and controlling its affects. This new model of value production is the perspective from which my paper provides a case based study on Facebook’s Timeline focusing on the cultural and political theme of affects and affective networks.
Posted on October 24, 2011 by terokarppi
Abstract: This paper discusses the role of disconnection in network culture. I argue that disconnection is a principle according to which our network culture is formed. Drawing from the writings of Kittler, Massumi and Galloway I analyze the emergence and transformation of our network culture in the context of nuclear war and DDoS attacks.
Disconnection as en event appears incompatible with the ubiquitous connections our network culture relies on. In fact since the beginning of the internet disconnection has been a spectre that everyone from scientists to computer security personnel and common users has tried to exorcise. A message needs to be sent and received and there is whole arsenal of technologies from hardware configurations to controlling protocols and translating software set up to make this possible. The network is planned so that its parts are held together in all circumstances.
Now the etymological meaning of incompatibility is ‘incapable of being held together’. This is indeed what disconnection implies. When disconnected the relation between two entities is removed. They do not communicate. If the idea of a network is to connect nodes that communicate with each other we see that disconnection is what is unwanted. Disconnection is then contingent upon the network. What follows is an exclusion of disconnection from the network culture. It is merely an accident that should not happen.
It is this dichotomy between connection and disconnection I want to challenge. Is it possible or even meaningful to think of disconnection as something that is compatible with our network culture? To begin with, we need to rethink our relation to accidents.
According to Paul Virilio (1993) it “is urgent that we rethink the accepted philosophical wisdom according to which the accident is relative and contingent and substance absolute and necessary.” Instead of thinking accidents as surprising failures that “unexpectedly befall” the machine, system or a mechanism Virilio (ibid.) argues that they should be considered as specific failures typical for the machine. What is said is that machines are produced and molded against their typical accidents. Cars are designed to avoid and survive road accidents. Ships are designed to avoid from sinking and so on. It is the threat of destruction as a primal accident that lurks behind the design of our machines. It is always implied in technology but simultaneously obscured almost to the point that it dissipates.
A corresponding idea is found from the writings of Friedrich Kittler (2007)crystallized as the concept of discourse networks. Drawing from Claude E. Shannon’s information theory of source, channel and receiver, Kittler shows that production of discourses is based on networks of institutional power and selection. (Winthrop-Young 2011). Interestingly these discourse networks are very susceptible for changes. In fact, game changing events for Kittler do not take place slowly in process of time but strike like a lighting providing shocks, jumps and ruptures (Armitage 2006).
Two significant moments in the history of the internet are taken into a closer examination: the invention of distributed networks in the shadows of nuclear war in 1960s and distributed denial of service attacks in 2000s. In the first case the aim is to show how the internet was conceived in the context of disconnection, appearing as the threat of nuclear war.
The effect of nuclear war on the birth of the internet has been both exaggerated and underestimated. Mostly however the birth of the internet is credited to ideals such as research and collaboration instead of for example destruction. In fact, being loyal to the Kittlerian position, I am not interested in these discourses as such. They are secondary for the discourse networks of the early internet. Instead, following Brian Massumi’s (2007) discussion on prevention and deterrence I discuss how Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) becomes a founding principle of the internet. In short, the concept of command and control communications is designed to survive a full spectrum of nuclear strikes without being disconnected. An outside threat of nuclear war is adopted as an operative logic of the net; it begins to grow bigger and bigger counting on the survivability of redundancy. Even its protological control, analyzed by Alexander Galloway (2004), is grounded in the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction.
In turn of the 21st Century things however change. Outside threat is replaced by a threat that comes within the network in the form of denial of distributed services attacks. These indiscriminate and indiscriminable attacks hit private users, companies such as Amazon and Sony and even states like Estonia. For destruction DDoS attacks use the very method that was created to save the network. What begins is a shift from distributed networks towards hubs of power – a becoming of anti-accidents by mimicking DDoS attacks. This second mode of disconnection in network culture will be analyzed in the context of Massumi’s (2007; 2009)concepts of preemption, the ecology of powers and neoliberalism.
What follows is a re-thinking of disconnection in relation to digital networks. The core argument is that threats and accidents such as disconnection are not incompatible with network culture but quite on the contrary they form the basis of how it is constructed, expressed and experienced.
Works Cited
Armitage, John. “From Discourse Networks to Cultural Mathematics: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler.” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 17-38.
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol, How Control Exists after Decentrailzation. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 2004.
Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Massumi, Brian. “National Enterprise Emergency. Steps Towards an Ecology of Powers.” Theory, Culture and Society, 2009: 153-185.
Massumi, Brian. “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007).
Virilio, Paul. “The Primal Accident.” In The Politics of Everyday Fear, by Brian (ed.) Massumi, 211-219. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. Kittler and the Media. Cambridge UK; Malden US: Polity Press, 2011.
In 2009 leaving Facebook became a trend. Two separate art projects Seppukoo.com and Web 2.0 Suicidemachine presented digital suicide as a method to disconnect oneself from the social networking service. In this article, I approach the problem of leaving Facebook. A critical analysis of leaving Facebook and using digital suicide sites illustrates how life becomes tangled and controlled in the ubiquitous webs of network culture, and moreover how biopolitical models of capitalism are embedded in the structures and practices of exploiting the users of social networks. Theoretically this article is inspired by critical studies of digital culture.
September 22, 2011 Facebook introduced Timeline. Quite simply Timeline collects your Facebook and other online activities and shows them in your profile. Your friends will see what song you are listening to, where you are and what you do if you allow the platform to track and share your activities. According to the Facebook blog, “Now, you and your friends will finally be able to tell all the different parts of your story – from the small things you do each day to your biggest moments.”
In fact, these changes do not intrinsically seem that new. Similar activities have been shared by Facebook users all along. However what is new is the way the sharing begins to happen. While social media has been seen as a dual platform for users actively sharing content and passively providing data for corporations (Dijck 2009) we are now moving towards a digital environment that reduces the user to a passive content/data provider. Users’ information is shared by the platform automatically and autonomously without their intentional involvement. Facebook calls this ‘serendipity’ and ‘frictionless sharing’.
As a consequence, my paper argues that the Timeline entails a new, affective, turn in Facebook’s history. This affective turn cannot be reduced to a mere visual renewal of the Facebook user interface. Quite on the contrary we are witnessing a comprehensive transformation in how social networks function as cultural and political media environments.
This transformation is discussed in the context of non-subjective autonomy of an affect proposed by Brian Massumi (2002). Affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity. It is not a feeling or sensation but an ability to affect and be affected; a body’s passage from one state to another. Affection on the other hand is “each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second affecting body” (Massumi 2004, xvii). Affects are located somewhere between passivity and activity, a resonance that cannot be directed entirely to a practical end. The key here is that Massumi’s interpretation of affects allows us to understand them from a non-subjective position. We do not need to reduce affects into subjective emotions; in fact we can understand affects without the subjective involvement as potentials transmitted between both human and non-human bodies (Bennett 2010, 61).
With improvements such as serendipity and frictionless sharing Facebook is moving from a mere quantification of data into building and controlling its affects. This new model of value production is the perspective from which my paper provides a case based study on Facebook’s Timeline focusing on the cultural and political theme of affects and affective networks.
Posted on October 24, 2011 by terokarppi
Abstract: This paper discusses the role of disconnection in network culture. I argue that disconnection is a principle according to which our network culture is formed. Drawing from the writings of Kittler, Massumi and Galloway I analyze the emergence and transformation of our network culture in the context of nuclear war and DDoS attacks.
Disconnection as en event appears incompatible with the ubiquitous connections our network culture relies on. In fact since the beginning of the internet disconnection has been a spectre that everyone from scientists to computer security personnel and common users has tried to exorcise. A message needs to be sent and received and there is whole arsenal of technologies from hardware configurations to controlling protocols and translating software set up to make this possible. The network is planned so that its parts are held together in all circumstances.
Now the etymological meaning of incompatibility is ‘incapable of being held together’. This is indeed what disconnection implies. When disconnected the relation between two entities is removed. They do not communicate. If the idea of a network is to connect nodes that communicate with each other we see that disconnection is what is unwanted. Disconnection is then contingent upon the network. What follows is an exclusion of disconnection from the network culture. It is merely an accident that should not happen.
It is this dichotomy between connection and disconnection I want to challenge. Is it possible or even meaningful to think of disconnection as something that is compatible with our network culture? To begin with, we need to rethink our relation to accidents.
According to Paul Virilio (1993) it “is urgent that we rethink the accepted philosophical wisdom according to which the accident is relative and contingent and substance absolute and necessary.” Instead of thinking accidents as surprising failures that “unexpectedly befall” the machine, system or a mechanism Virilio (ibid.) argues that they should be considered as specific failures typical for the machine. What is said is that machines are produced and molded against their typical accidents. Cars are designed to avoid and survive road accidents. Ships are designed to avoid from sinking and so on. It is the threat of destruction as a primal accident that lurks behind the design of our machines. It is always implied in technology but simultaneously obscured almost to the point that it dissipates.
A corresponding idea is found from the writings of Friedrich Kittler (2007)crystallized as the concept of discourse networks. Drawing from Claude E. Shannon’s information theory of source, channel and receiver, Kittler shows that production of discourses is based on networks of institutional power and selection. (Winthrop-Young 2011). Interestingly these discourse networks are very susceptible for changes. In fact, game changing events for Kittler do not take place slowly in process of time but strike like a lighting providing shocks, jumps and ruptures (Armitage 2006).
Two significant moments in the history of the internet are taken into a closer examination: the invention of distributed networks in the shadows of nuclear war in 1960s and distributed denial of service attacks in 2000s. In the first case the aim is to show how the internet was conceived in the context of disconnection, appearing as the threat of nuclear war.
The effect of nuclear war on the birth of the internet has been both exaggerated and underestimated. Mostly however the birth of the internet is credited to ideals such as research and collaboration instead of for example destruction. In fact, being loyal to the Kittlerian position, I am not interested in these discourses as such. They are secondary for the discourse networks of the early internet. Instead, following Brian Massumi’s (2007) discussion on prevention and deterrence I discuss how Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) becomes a founding principle of the internet. In short, the concept of command and control communications is designed to survive a full spectrum of nuclear strikes without being disconnected. An outside threat of nuclear war is adopted as an operative logic of the net; it begins to grow bigger and bigger counting on the survivability of redundancy. Even its protological control, analyzed by Alexander Galloway (2004), is grounded in the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction.
In turn of the 21st Century things however change. Outside threat is replaced by a threat that comes within the network in the form of denial of distributed services attacks. These indiscriminate and indiscriminable attacks hit private users, companies such as Amazon and Sony and even states like Estonia. For destruction DDoS attacks use the very method that was created to save the network. What begins is a shift from distributed networks towards hubs of power – a becoming of anti-accidents by mimicking DDoS attacks. This second mode of disconnection in network culture will be analyzed in the context of Massumi’s (2007; 2009)concepts of preemption, the ecology of powers and neoliberalism.
What follows is a re-thinking of disconnection in relation to digital networks. The core argument is that threats and accidents such as disconnection are not incompatible with network culture but quite on the contrary they form the basis of how it is constructed, expressed and experienced.
Works Cited
Armitage, John. “From Discourse Networks to Cultural Mathematics: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler.” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 17-38.
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol, How Control Exists after Decentrailzation. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 2004.
Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007.
Massumi, Brian. “National Enterprise Emergency. Steps Towards an Ecology of Powers.” Theory, Culture and Society, 2009: 153-185.
Massumi, Brian. “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption.” Theory & Event 10, no. 2 (2007).
Virilio, Paul. “The Primal Accident.” In The Politics of Everyday Fear, by Brian (ed.) Massumi, 211-219. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. Kittler and the Media. Cambridge UK; Malden US: Polity Press, 2011.