{"id":3678,"date":"2015-06-01T05:53:44","date_gmt":"2015-06-01T05:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=3678"},"modified":"2016-08-14T05:20:52","modified_gmt":"2016-08-14T05:20:52","slug":"social-medias-charts-and-metrics-turn-us-into-quantified-digital-versions-of-ourselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/social-medias-charts-and-metrics-turn-us-into-quantified-digital-versions-of-ourselves\/","title":{"rendered":"Social media’s charts and metrics turn us into quantified digital versions of ourselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jefferson Pooley<\/a>, Muhlenberg College<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Earlier this month, LinkedIn announced<\/a> an update to its users\u2019 already-teeming profile view. The social network now lets you track and chart who\u2019s viewed your posts, complete with a \u201cperformance summary\u201d and a colorful demographic breakdown. The new analytics tool extends last year\u2019s big feature update<\/a>, which encouraged users to see how they \u201crank\u201d (as in, \u201cYou rank in the top 48% for profile views among your connections\u201d). The service already let you track your profile views, with an \u201cinsights\u201d graph and an invitation to \u201cSee how you\u2019re trending.\u201d<\/p>\n

On LinkedIn, we see ourselves in reflection \u2013 as we do all the time, though perhaps without such bar-graph depth. Life online is a hall of mirrors, where we catch our own visage multiple times a day. There is that scrollable story of our lives, Facebook\u2019s Timeline.<\/p>\n

<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Twitter we may glance at our profile\u2019s mix of pithy self-description and retweet metrics<\/a>. Google \u201cself-Googling\u201d<\/a> and nearly a million hits come up. We know that those Netflix or Amazon recommendations are generated from a history of our clicks. Even the ads we see are glancing back at us with tailored copy \u2013 and we have a dawning sense that that\u2019s really us<\/em> they\u2019re pitching to.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re always encountering these self-likenesses. The sheer quantity and variety matter, but what\u2019s more interesting is that they are not<\/em> like a reflection in the mirror. Instead of the face and upper torso, we see retweet counts and Google search results. Lots of these self-likeness snapshots confront us as numbers and text. Seeing ourselves like this, tallied and set in type, almost certainly changes the self-image we carry around. The result is not just amped-up self-consciousness, but a different kind altogether \u2013 more thing-like and tabular. The self that\u2019s looking back through the glass resembles an instrument panel.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Check your social media instrument panels, recalibrate the self.<\/span>
\nRoger Smith<\/a>, CC BY-NC-ND<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The reason this matters is that we never stop revising the picture we have of ourselves<\/a>. We sense that our identities are fixed in place \u2013 rock-solid and immovable \u2013 but we\u2019re wrong about that<\/a>. Each time we see ourselves represented in, for example, our Twitter profile or judged with a flurry of comments on our Facebook status, we recalibrate<\/a>. Yes, these are tiny, iterative acts of self-adjustment; no one fancies himself dashing and mysterious after 150 likes on his filtered Instagram selfie. But the self is, as the sociologist George Herbert Mead observed 80 years ago<\/a>, \u201can eddy in the social current and so still a part of the current.\u201d Our lot is continual adjustment, based on what we see in all these glowing LED rectangles.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
What does that little screen tell you about you?<\/span>
\nJapanexperterna.se<\/a>, CC BY-SA<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a result, we\u2019re getting used to seeing ourselves as detached and distributed \u2013 as something external to our bodies and inner experience. It\u2019s true that we have been thinking about ourselves as objects to be managed (and promoted) for a long time. \u201cPossessive individualism\u201d<\/a> is a major strand in the history of the Western self, one that political scientist CB Macpherson<\/a> has traced back to the 17th century. Certainly the injunction to \u201csell\u201d oneself<\/a> predates Mark Zuckerberg. But the self-likeness deluge can\u2019t help but amplify the point: you\u2019re the product and<\/em> its chief marketer. The language of \u201cself-branding,\u201d so recently off-putting and gauche, is now utterly banal \u2013 in part because<\/em> we\u2019re spending so much time tuning and calibrating and viewing our web-based doppelg\u00e4ngers.<\/p>\n

These portraits, some of them anyway, are composed in numbers and line charts. WolframAlpha<\/a> offers \u201cpersonal analytics\u201d<\/a> for Facebook. The analytics are<\/em> personal \u2013 and colorful. A few dozen charts, maps and tables add up to a numerical portrait of your life on Facebook. There\u2019s your most-liked post, a word cloud culled from your statuses, and a graph tracking the length of your posts over time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Oh no! Are more followers disengaged than before?<\/span>
\nCambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Social media sites like LinkedIn and Pinterest present users with profile pages that resemble gaming leaderboards or a corporation\u2019s annual report. Twitter, on its newish profile page (\u201ca whole new you\u201d) and almost everywhere else, banners your Tweets-Following-Followers triptych. Fitbit\u2019s dashboard could be mistaken for a flight simulator. On some sites we don\u2019t see the numbers, but know they are there. With Facebook\u2019s Timeline, for example, most of us sense that our reverse-chronological self is generated by a likes-and-comments, secret-sauce algorithm. It\u2019s not just the hardcore quantified-selfers<\/a> who get to see themselves reflected in charts and figures.<\/p>\n

Data-rich self-representations aren\u2019t new \u2013 think report cards and resumes. There are just a lot more of them now. It\u2019s like a perpetual Google alert \u2013 and with no real opt-out. The result is something like digital self-consciousness<\/em>, in both the behind-the-screen, computerized sense and the ones-twos-and-threes numerical sense. If the self, as sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued<\/a>, is a performance, the online enactments are dispersed and disembodied. Plus the scene never ends, and there\u2019s no backstage. Psychologists have written about \u201cpublic self-consciousness\u201d<\/a> for decades, but we\u2019re now faced with dozens of always-on selves getting served from data centers thousands of miles away. And these self-likenesses aren\u2019t just out-of-body but digital in that second sense: numbers set in flat sans serif. We\u2019re used to seeing the dashboard self, in other words, and its fun-house, bits-and-binary reflection doesn\u2019t faze us.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
You are the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.<\/span>
\nDustin O’Donnell Design<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So the online self is both external and metricized. Taken together, these two traits encourage an Oz-like mentality. We\u2019re pulling levers and uploading profile pics, or we\u2019re anxious that we haven\u2019t fed our Klout-filtered amour-propre<\/em> lately. We come to see ourselves as fungible objects, requiring constant work \u2013 product-improvement work \u2013 to exchange for friendship, employment and self-esteem. Those are good, necessary things, of course. But Facebook and its rivals need us to keep preening, posting and working. That way they can deliver tailored ads that, in their targeted flow, look like us.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Jefferson Pooley<\/a> is Associate Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jefferson Pooley, Muhlenberg College Earlier this month, LinkedIn announced an update to its users\u2019 already-teeming profile view. The social network now lets you track and chart who\u2019s viewed your posts, complete with a \u201cperformance summary\u201d and a colorful demographic breakdown. The new analytics tool extends last year\u2019s big feature update, which encouraged users to see […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":6139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3678"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3678"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6140,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3678\/revisions\/6140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}