Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

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And when we use devices that track our physical state to provide clues for self-understanding, we work with another constraint: We try to find a narrative that fits our numbers.
    In one common way of doing things, wearable technology collects data that track such things as our heart rate, respiration, perspiration, body temperature, movement, and sleep routines. These data can go right to a display on our phones where we can use them to work toward physical self-improvement. A readout of how many steps we’ve taken can encourage better exercise habits. In another kind of tracking app, physiological signs are used as windows onto our psychological state.
    Here, the desire to wear a tracking device responds to the same impulse that had nearly everyone in my generation buying a mood ring. The difference is that even though the ring was fun, it had no authority. The new tracking devices come with substantial authority. We develop a view of ourselves (body and mind) that is tied to what measurement tells us.
    While some tracking applications use sensors to read your body
for
you, others ask
you
to report your mood or degree of focus or the fights you are having with your partner. Over time, there is a subtle shift. In some sense, “you” become the number of steps you walked this week compared to last. “You” become a lowered resting heart rate over the span of two months. You move to a view of self as the sum, bit by bit, of its measurable elements. Self-tracking does not logically imply a machine view of self, or the reduction of self-worth to a number, but it gets people in the habit of thinking of themselves as made up of measurable units and achievements. It makes it natural to ask, “What is my score?”
    In the 1980s, I wrote of the movement from the psychoanalytic to the computer culture as a shift from meaning to mechanism—from depth to surface. At that time, as computation gained ground as the dominant metaphor for describing the mind, there was a shift from thinking about the self as constituted by human language and history to seeing it as something that could be modeled in machine code.
    Today’s “quantified” or “algorithmic” self is certainly part of that larger story but adds something new. Instead of taking the computer as the model for a person, the quantified self goes directly to people and asks each of us to treat ourselves as though we were computational objects, subject to a printout of our ever more knowable states. The psychoanalytic self looks to history as it leaves traces in language; the algorithmic self to what it can track as data points in a time series.
Numbers and Narration
    N umbers are seductive. People like thinking about themselves in terms of readouts and scores. This is not new. We have always been drawn to horoscopes, personality tests, and quizzes in magazines. Benjamin Franklin famously included a self-tracker in his autobiography, measuring himself on thirteen personal virtues every day. The difference now is that there is, as we say, “an app for that”—indeed, for all of that and more. More and more of our lives—body and soul—can be captured as data and fed back to us, analyzed by algorithm. And in the process, we are usually asked to treat ourselves and the algorithm as a black box.
    We see the frustration of having a number without a narrative in Trish, twenty-one, who uses an online journaling program called 750 Words. Every day, Trish writes 750 words and the program analyzes what she has written. It compares her daily writing to what she has written before and to the universe of all the other people writing. It rates her words—or as she sees it, it rates “her”—on maturity, sexual content, on the violence in her writing and how much she uses swear words. And it gives her a reading of her preoccupations. When I talk to Trish, she is confused. One day last week, 750