Seeing Ourselves Through Technology DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661.0001 Also by Jill Walker Rettberg BLOGGING (2nd edn, 2014) DIGITAL CULTURE, PLAY AND IDENTITY: A World of Warcraft Reader (edited with H. G. Corneliussen, 2008) DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661.0001 Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves Jill Walker Rettberg University of Bergen, Norway Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661.0001 © Jill Walker Rettberg 2014 Th e author has asserted her right to be identifi ed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Open access: Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fift h Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN: 978-1-349-99539-4 ISBN: 978-1-137-47666-1 PDF A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. www.palgrave.com/pivot DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661 Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Written, Visual and Quantitative Self-Representations 1 Writing about the self 4 Visual self-portraits in history 7 The history of quantitative self-representation 9 Texts or people? 11 Disciplining self-representations 17 2 Filtered Reality 20 Technological and cultural filters 22 Aestheticising, anesthetising and defamiliarising 25 Choosing what technology can do 27 Genres as filters 30 A filtered world 31 3 Serial Selfies 33 Cumulative self-presentations 35 Time lapse selfies 36 Profile photos as visual identity 40 Automatic portraits 42 4 Automated Diaries 45 Life poetry told by sensors 47 Capture all 49 A photo every 30 seconds 51 Algorithms to find meaning 55 Gamified lives 57 DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661.0001 v vi Contents 5 Quantified Selves 61 A fantasy of knowing 63 Dataism and subjective data visualisation 68 Measure more 70 What we cannot measure 72 The pleasure of control 73 Machine vision 75 6 Privacy and Surveillance 79 Forced portraits 80 Who the advertisers think I am 81 Power and discipline 83 Seeing ourselves 87 References 89 Index 99 DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661.0001 Acknowledgements This book was written while I was on sabbatical, and although I have been thinking about the ideas and practices discussed in this book for many years, I would not have been able to write this book without that time to devote to research. My sabbatical was funded by the University of Bergen and by a Leiv Eiriksson fellowship from the Norwegian Research Council that allowed me to spend the first half of 2014 in the United States. I also received generous funding from the University of Bergen’s Open Access Publication Fund, which made it possible to publish this under a CC-BY license. I am grateful to work at a university that is willing to try out new models for supporting open access to scholarship. Thank you also to Palgrave Macmillan for experimenting with this model. My host for my sabbatical in the United States was the Communications Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and I would particularly like to thank Steve Jones and Zizi Papacharissi for generously inviting me to spend a semester there. Steve also gave me oppor- tunities to share my research, and I received very useful feedback from professors and students in the department and in the UIC Digital Humanities Working Group. Thanks as well to the International Office at UIC, and to the Norwegian Research Council’s guide for Norwegian scholars going on a scholarly exchange to the United States. I had no idea how many practicalities were needed for an international exchange: the visa, finding an apart- ment, renting out our own apartment, finding schools and getting all the health paperwork settled for the kids, car DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661.0002 vii viii Acknowledgements insurance and much more. I was glad to have competent guides both at UIC and at home – and it was all very much worth it. While in the United States, I have had the opportunity to discuss the ideas presented in this book with colleagues at several other universities. Thank you to Nick Montfort for hosting me at MIT for ten days and for very fruit- ful discussions with colleagues in Cambridge and Boston. I was also invited to present this work at Brown University, at Winona State University and at Wilfred Laurier University, and at all these places I learnt about new things, heard stories or gained new perspectives that I have integrated into the book. Thank you very much to Elli Mylonas, Davin Heckman and Jeremy Hunsinger for arranging these talks. I would also like to thank Lars Nyre and UH-nett Vest for arranging the Medium Design seminar in London in December 2013, where I first presented the general plan of this book. Writing about digital media I have found a lot of inspirations online. In addition to reading blogs and finding relevant material from links on Twitter and Facebook, I found great support and inspiration in the Selfie Research Network established on Facebook by Terri Senft. It has been very valuable to be able to throw out an idea and get instant feedback, to share bibliographies and case studies, and to find a likeminded community of scholars interested in studying these forms of self-representation online. Many thanks also to Annette Markham for very useful feedback on chap- ter 3 and to my reviewers for many excellent suggestions. Thank you to my colleagues in the University of Bergen Electronic Litera- ture Research Group and the Digital Culture Research Group for frequent discussions and day to day support. Thanks also to the University of Bergen library, and especially the research librarian for digital culture, Aud Gjers- dal, for exceptional library assistance. And thank you to everyone at The Wormhole Coffee for providing a writing environment where you can sip an excellent coffee with a dragon pattern on top for hours surrounded by other diligently typing people all in a time-travel themed environment. Most of all, I am grateful to my family. My husband Scott Rettberg has been my trusted colleague and beloved best friend for over a decade, and his input and our discussions always inform my work. My daughter Aurora shows me how to see other parts of the Internet than I usually see. She patiently taught me to understand Tumblr and to chat more visually. I get some of my best leads from links she sends me. My little ones, Jessie and Benji, have taught me that selfies are fascinating to even the youngest among us, and they keep me laughing and climbing and playing. Thank you. DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661.0002 OPEN 1 Written, Visual and Quantitative Self-Representations Abstract: There are three distinct modes of self- representation in digital media: written, visual and quantitative. Each mode has a separate pre-digital history, each of which is presented briefly in this chapter. Blog and written status updates are descendents of diaries, memoirs, commonplace books and autobiographies. Selfies are descendants of visual artists’ self-portraits, and the quantitative modes of lifelogs, personal maps, productivity records and activity trackers are descendants of genres such as accounting, habit tracking and to-do lists. In today’s digital culture, the three modes are intertwined. Digital self-representation is conversational and allows new voices to be heard. However, society disciplines digital self- representations such as selfies and blogs through ridicule and pathologising. Rettberg, Jill Walker. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137476661.0003. DOI: 10.1057/9781137476661.0003 Seeing Ourselves Through Technology In 1524 Parmigianino painted his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Parmi- gianino used oil paints to paint on the hollow inside of half a wooden ball, to mimic the shape of the mirror he copied his reflection from. The distortions of the convex mirror are exactly replicated in Parmigianino’s self-portrait. His hand is in the foreground, grossly distorted by the fish- eye perspective of the convex mirror he is looking into to see himself. We can just see the short pencil he is holding to sketch his own image. We see what he sees. Parmigianino used a convex mirror to see himself; today we use digital technologies. We snap selfies on our phones and post them to Instagram. We write about our lives in blogs and in status updates to Facebook. We wear activity trackers on our wrists, log our productivity and allow Facebook and other apps to track our locations continuously. The data we track is displayed back to us as graphs, maps, progress charts and timelines. Parmigianino’s self-portrait may not seem to have much in common with a FitBit user’s charts of steps and sleep patterns, but both are examples of how technology is a means to see part of ourselves.