“Printing Walkable Visualizations”

To me, the most interesting parts here are when people became upset that they weren’t represented in the visualizations; easily corrected in a digital environment, but when made physical, it is more permanent (or at least costly to amend). Thus when Dario visualized the collective, he was also, by necessity, excluding some people. I wonder what it could have looked like if it were more flexible, with the option of adding and removing people. Otherwise you end up with a defined, fixed, bounded group rather than a representation of the real ever-shifting, growing and shrinking network.

“Mapping as a Contemporary Instrument for Orientation in Conferences”

I was wondering what is meant by “Documentality.” Is there a definition to be included in later drafts? I like the idea of looking at the specific language used in conference publications as more than just a means to express an idea, but also as the expression of aspects of the author. Maybe that is what is meant by “Documentality.” I think there is more to unpack here too: institutional constraints, advisors/editors/coauthors perpetuating a certain standard language, etc.

I also noticed that the map is “dynamic and interactive” and as a digital artifact it can be amended. I wonder if that is a result of experiencing people’s feelings about exclusion from the previous project.

“The Daily Design of the Quantified Self”

I think this is really interesting, to unpack what it means for people to be constantly measuring, recording, quantifying themselves, knowingly and unknowingly. I see a couple of Foucault’s concepts coming into play here:

  • Technologies of the self: The idea of “self-design” attributed to Boris Groys (p.5) seems to get at this. Foucault writes that technologies of the self are those techniques “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Foucault 1982). So where do those techniques, and the definition of those states (happiness, purity, etc) come from?

  • Governmentality: Foucault defines governmentality as the “contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self” (Foucault 1991 via Esteban-Guitart 2014). This is where others come in to make you regulate your own thoughts and behaviors, through the enforcement of norms. Governmentality is dictatation to others what to apsire to and how to get there; in other words, the sanctioning of technologies of the self. It is a way to maintain power over people by making them obsessed with self-improvement according to a defined standard.

Foucault argues that these processes are how notions of self and identity are formed in society. And I think they are relevant here because we are talking about self-governing techniques. In this case it is a process of continuous recording that allows one to govern (“design”) oneself. Foucault actually uses the example of Marcus Aurelius to explain technologies of the self: recording his actions was a way for Marcus Aurelius to confront himself with the difference between thoughts and actions, and discipline his actions to be more in line with his thoughts (Foucault 1982). So is this really about design, or is it about governance and discipline? Is there a meaningful difference?

I also wanted the “unknowing” part of this to be drawn out a bit more, the nonconsensual or dubiously consensual collection of biodata, private communications, and usage patterns. But maybe that’s a topic for another paper entirely. Books have already been written on the subject, at any rate. But some of this is kind of dystopian. (For some reason the Biological Passport struck me as especially dystopic, but I could see how it’s useful to a sports team.)