Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle Page A

Words told her that her daily writing exercise had shown her to be preoccupied with death.
    Trish is a study in contrasts. A competitive athlete and a philosophy student, she wants to go to drama school when she graduates from college. She became acquainted with feedback devices when she bought aFitbit, a popular commercial product that provides readings on daily steps taken, calories burned, and sleep quality. From there, she became curious about programs that would give her other kinds of feedback. When I met her, she had spent six months working with 750 Words.
    On the day Trish was told that she was preoccupied with death, she had used her 750 words to describe a conversation with a friend that had left her feeling misunderstood. Trish said it felt good to write it down. But then, alone with the program’s readout, she felt frustrated. She didn’t understand what her misunderstanding with her friend had to do with death. She wanted to understand the algorithm .
    It’s shocking that I write about death more than others. Actually, I don’t mind the comparisons to the rest of the world’s writing. What’s hard are the comparisons to myself. It’s hard not to take it personally, so it gets me thinking. The death thing is really strange. It makes me wonder why it thinks that.
    What most frustrates Trish is that once the program gets her thinking, there is no place to take her thoughts or her objections. Trish says, “It’s not like the program is my therapist. There isn’t a relationship. I can’t talk to it about why it feels that way. I don’t feel that I’m thinking about death.” And even if 750 Words could tell her which words had “triggered ” the program’s reactions, she is not sure that would help. Trish wants a conversation.
    Technology critic Evgeny Morozov argues the limitations of the kinds of data that Trish has been left with. A narrative has been reduced to a number. And now the number seems like a result. Morozov fears that when you have your readout from the black box, you are tempted to stop there . You are pleased. Or you are upset.
    But as we become more sophisticated about the kinds of data that self-monitoring devices return to us, that first impulse need not be our last impulse. We can construct narratives around our numbers. Indeed, in Trish we see the impulse to do that. (“It makes me wonder why it thinks that.”) And in meetings of those who declare themselves to bepart of the “quantified self movement,” people do bring in data from sensors and programs and attempt to construct stories around them.
    In this spirit, a recently divorced woman in her thirties posted a blog of self-reflection and called it “The Quantified Breakup.” In the days and months after her divorce, she tracked the number of texts she wrote and calls she made (and to whom), songs she listened to (classified happy or sad), places she went, unnecessary purchases and their costs. She tracked her sleeping and waking hours, when and for how long she exercised, ate out, and went to the movies. When did she cry in public and post on social media?
    Reading this material is arresting. Yet as I read her blog, it seems like raw data for another story about what the purchases and the tears and the songs mean. Does this experience bring her back to other times when she has felt alone? To other losses?
    What strategies worked then? What potential stumbling blocks can be determined from her history? What kind of support does she need? On the blog, there isn’t much of this kind of talk. But we do learn that when she tried online dating and met someone she liked, they exchanged “1,146 [texts] in the first four weeks alone, an average of 40.9 per day.” And then it was over. What can we make of this? What can she? The numbers of “The Quantified Breakup” need their narrative.
    I have a similar reaction to quantified self