Will a data-selfie boost your immune system?

Time_online

What does all our personal data add up to? Is it a boon to big data marketers helping companies mine your personal data or just a nightmare scenario for complete loss of privacy? As an artist who grew up in the tech industry and loves technology, I have thought about a future where personal data could become meaningful. Maybe all this vaguely unpleasant surveillance and data gathering about us could turn into a surprisingly insightful view of ourselves and be delivered in ways that will be irresistible. In the future I imagine human data portraits manifested from reams of personal tracking data gathered invisibly as we move thru the day. Genuine data-selfies. We are so close to gathering every possible morsel of data about us, imagine what could be possible once you owned every bit of data gathered about you. After some thought, I decided it’s more than just seeing personal data and abstract patterns of you. It’s about what these patterns will tell us about ourselves. Data collected about us will unfold a personal narrative and story to reveal a hidden part of us we are trained to ignore, a way to know ourselves and anticipate what comes next. Perhaps seeing the abstract patterns and rhythms of your self-tracking data is a short-cut to mindfulness. A quick and dirty way to boost your immune system, the benefits of meditation and self-reflection without much effort.

We describe self-tracking in Calvinist utilitarian terms using fitness and health examples, the real fuel will be the desire to understand ourselves. While social-media, Twitter and Facebook tapped into the basic emotional desire for bonding and connection to other people, the personal data phenomenon will tap into the basic emotional desire to know ourselves. To see yourself, the part of you that’s invisible to you. To understand and anticipate. Who am I?

The tyranny of tiny tasks

I wasn't expecting much from the apple watch announcement, I wore a Basis watch for 9 months and have been wearing the much cuter Android Gear from Samsung. No surprise -- sensors, batterylife, tethered to a phone, what can you do on a watchface...problems are still a cobbled mess. But, I've been looking at all the reviews with great interest this week to see the blogosphere weigh in. And this is the most insightful Seth Feigerman citing Tim Wu in a Mashable article.

"It's the productivity side, I realized after a few hours of thinking, that makes me sweat. I recalled one paragraph in particular that writer Tim Wu published last month in The New Yorker discussing the downside of "convenience technology" like the smartphone:

Our technologies may have made us prosthetic gods, yet they have somehow failed to deliver on the central promise of free time. The problem is that, as every individual task becomes easier, we demand much more of both ourselves and others. Instead of fewer difficult tasks (writing several long letters) we are left with a larger volume of small tasks (writing hundreds of emails). We have become plagued by a tyranny of tiny tasks, individually simple but collectively oppressive. And, when every task in life is easy, there remains just one profession left: multitasking.

The "tyranny of tiny tasks," as Wu called it, may only get more tyrannical if the Apple Watch draws in more developers and users, pushing the smartwatch beyond the early adopter community. Computers shifted us from writing occasional time-consuming letters to writing a mounting number of emails. Smartphones allowed us to fire off an exponentially larger number of emails as well as quicker messages through other applications."

I'm still in the studio making new works built on 'time', the way we feel time, use time and place ourselves solidly in time. Something has shifted, and we're all feeling it.

Time is both squishy and stretchy

You know who you are by where you are in TIME. When you get knocked out, and come to….the first thing the doctor asks is “what is your name” …and “what day is it?” Who you are and where you are in time is vital to your grasp of consciousness, your sense of self.

Time is sequential, ordered and related to what comes just before or after. It’s the one thing we have that is pretty-much free and simultaneously valuable. Even though we don’t let ourselves think about it….time for each of us is finite. Do we agonize, procrastinate or consciously think about how we spend our time?

I’ve been reading tons of physics books about time lately, and I’ve begun to consider how abstract the notion of time can be. What really is it? We measure and remember time from the activities we do in time. But time is squishy and stretchy, some things are tedious, boring and go on forever, or time slips by without notice.

We make split-second decisions about what we do now, next and then after that…how we spend our time must be a reflection of our basic nature.

It’s become so easy to track your time, I turned Moment on my iphone and know how often I touch the screen and how many minutes I looked at my phone today. Manictime on my laptop tracks every click, every website and app I use. Some days it’s scary how many hours I spent online when I thought I was making stuff in the studio all day. Think of everything else that tracks your time.... your car knows how fast you pressed on the gas pedal and every minute you drove today. The MTA pass, the security swipe at work, your front door probably knows when you walked into your apartment.

Time is measured, and we are so close to knowing exactly how we spent every minute of it. and we are so close to knowing exactly how we spent every minute of it.

If we are what we do, will tracking time help me understand who I am?

Do you feel bad about how you spend your time?

I always thought how you spend your time was like women buying shoes... no matter what else is happening with how clothes fit your body at any moment, it's always fun to try on shoes. You feel good about shoes. I imagined people were like that about their time. I'm learning the answer is NO. After scrolling thru Amazon unlimited looking at hundreds and hundreds of books on time management, I asked a friend how there could possibly be so many books published on getting control of your time. And the friend blankly looked at me and said "because people feel bad about how they spend their time". Which is all very curious because I'm investigating the notion that YOU are your time, you are defined by how you spend your time, the activities and even unconscious use of time says loads about your psyche, your personality and your inner-self. Your sense of who you are is based on the recollection of recent events, and what you are doing and intend to do. It's your basic orientation in the world.

If you hit your head in a car accident, the very first question is "What day is it, can you tell me your name?". To be cognizant in the world is to know who you are in time. Are you connected and aware of time and place...etc, etc. It's so basic, we rarely even notice time. For the most part we have control over the many, many decisions for what we do and how time is used.

Yeah, yeah we have a job, go to work, return calls to clients, have deadlines. But even within what is believed to be a tightly constrained world, we make decisions about our time. All those little decisions add up to your life. Little bits make the whole.

I'm intensely curious about the unconscious spurts of time that drive the pattern or rhythm of time as you work online. As I write this, there are fast clicks as I spew out a fast phrase, and then pause as I decide how to make the second half of this sentence connect and make sense. Even as you click, click, pause, click as you read and delete emails, or flip thru research. How much do you read and how fast do you click a link. There is a rhythm to the clicks.

Manictime is a backgroud app that runs on my laptop to capture every click, every app, webpage, link...everything I do as I work. Have run it for almost 3 years and I know my time online has a rhythm. (Oh jeez, I just grabbed the manictime link and realized it's described in google as a 'time management' app, ugh...sorry.)

I know my mornings are a burst of clicks...and afternoons are slower, longer as I read things or work on longer things. Am right in the midst of working this out, and imagining the physicality of your time in textured pattern. Would you recognize yourself? Do you swing wildly, or have a repetitive pattern like hearing the chorus of the melody over and over and over? If you read this and have any ideas about how you see yourself in time -- message me (not here, I turned off comments on my blog ages ago...no need to explain.) I'm easy to find online.

FRICKbits is live!! It's free, no catch. Download it now.

Don't hesitate, hit the download now. It's going to take you a few days, weeks to really collect enough data to actually have it feel like art or anything resembling your patterns. Don't worry, I never see your data, everything all resides on your phone. If you are super curious, --go to my FRICKbits site, the privacy policy is on the front page.

It's taken years to get this first step. I almost can't believe it's live.

And this is just the beginning, I believe all that data and surveillance about you is meaningful. Perhaps the secret to figuring out who you are, rather than hide…I say grab it all. “Take back your data and turn it into art”. This app will get better, the algorithm will convey more and have more complexity. Just get started. !!

Holy crap... you did something great!

YOU made something impossible in the regular world ....possible. Reaching out to explain how it feels...you are changing the culture of art and innovation. Be proud. Kickstarter funded at 450% of goal with almost 700 backers. It's the beginning...take back your data!