Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle Page B

enthusiasts who have a death in the family and numerically track their period of grief with the expressed intent of not wanting to skip over any part of the mourning process. The impulse is admirable, moving. But one wonders if in tracking their grief, they keep themselves too busy to feel it. Does taking our emotional pulse and giving it a number keep us on the feeling or does it distract us because, once categorized, we have done something “constructive” with the feeling and don’t have to attend to it anymore?
    Does tracking mourning help us mourn or does it deflect us because if we feel we must start and end our story with a number, we limit the stories we tell?
    Natasha Dow Schüll, the anthropologist, is doing an ethnographic study of the meetings of the quantitative self movement. At thesemeetings, members of the movement who have been “self-tracking” stand up to tell their stories. Schüll writes: “The defining activity of QS [the quantified self movement] is its Show and Tell events, in which individual self-trackers get onstage and tell a story about what they tracked, what they learned, etcetera.” Schüll is impressed by the QS Show and Tell. She asks, “Aren’t numbers just an element in a narrative process ?”
    The answer for me is not simple. Numbers are an element in a narrative process, but they are not
just
an element. When we have a number, it tends to take on special importance even as it leaves to us all the heavy lifting of narrative construction. Yet it constrains that construction because the story we tell has to justify the number. Your quantified data history can provide material for constructing a story. But here, our language betrays us. We talk about the “output” from our tracking programs as “results.” But they are not results. They are first steps. But too often, they are first steps that don’t suggest second steps.
    For if the program’s results make no sense to us, we have no place to go. So when 750 Words gave Trish a “result” that baffled her (she doesn’t think she has morbidity on her mind), it provided no further guidance and no interlocutor. Trish is left puzzled and does not know how to further understand why her words are associated with death—by the numbers.
    I talk about tracking and self-reflection with Margaret E. Morris, a psychologist at the Intel Corporation who for over a decade has worked on applications that help people record and visualize their emotional and physical health. When Morris considers her work over the years, she says that what strikes her about the feedback devices she has made is that “they are most powerful as a starting point, not an ending point,” and that “every one of them started a conversation.” In terms of making a difference to health and family dynamics,
it was the conversation that brought about change.
    Morris says that sometimes the conversation was begun by a family member or friend. In one of Morris’s cases, a woman housebound by chronic illness was asked to report her moods to a mobile phone app. Several times a day, this program, called Mood Map, asked the womanto indicate her mood on a visual display. When she was sad, the program would suggest techniques drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy that might help her see things in a more positive light. In this case, it was the patient’s son who used the Mood Map to start a conversation. The technology gave him an opening to talk about his mother’s loneliness, something he had not been able to do on his own. Morris sums up: “To the extent that these technologies have an impact, it is because they spark conversations along the way .”
Performing for and Deferring to the Algorithm
    L inda, a thirty-three-year-old business student, is more enthusiastic than Trish about her experience with 750 Words because Linda sees the program as dispensing a kind of