MJ Cunniff will buy hoop food for anyone who comes to the hoop with a pair of dry pants for me to borrow. Seriously. I’m wearing the Amish dress right now.
–Feb. 25th, 2010
I’ve always been the person in my social groups who uses social media the most thoroughly – especially in recent years, when concerns about privacy and data mining have been on the rise, and the current tide of popular opinion has shifted to feeling anxious and unhappy about using Facebook and other social media sites. (I was glad to see a lifelogger claim what I’ve always said in these instances, that “knowing there’s a permanent backup of almost everything he reads, sees, or hears allows him to live more in the moment” (Thompson 32), but I also ended up thinking mostly of that XKCD comic: “why the fuck do you care how someone else enjoys a sunset?”)
So I already had an archive of certain moments — almost eight years of my life, between 2006 and now, was covered in my Facebook profile, with a new status or link between every other day and twice-daily over the wide majority of that time. Of course, this was a conscious archive: I had already chosen what to tell a narrative about, which strengthens that version of the memory, and separates it already from the actual lived experience; I could use my Facebook wall to remember things I’d forgotten, then, but I doubt I’d find much use for it to correct false memories I’d created. And, because Facebook is structured the way it is, it isn’t searchable; instead, the most I could do was sort chronologically, by object type (and then chronologically – such as with photos or locations or notes), or by person (“view friendship,” assuming we remained FB friends and that we had reliably tagged each other in our mentions and photos.) I could not, for example, check to see if my feelings about French in 2008 during my last long slog though my alma mater’s language requirement were the same as mine in 2015 while beginning to prepare for my future PhD program’s language requirement…though I was reminded of a similar thought through random browsing:
MJ Cunniff No matter how often I think or say otherwise, the Latin infinitive for “to be” is never going to be “être.” Non est bonum.
–Feb. 17th, 2013
The thing that, as you can see, I’m doing in this post – going through and looking at the statuses happening around this time a few years ago – is of course similar to the concept of the FoursquareAnd7YearsAgo app (Thompson 38), which has been applied to Facebook as well with the Timehop app (which pulls from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and even your smartphone’s camera roll.) Given the thrilled and surprised customer reviews for these sorts of products (“Happy Time Traveler” is currently at the top of the iTunes app store, giving it five stars), I’m starting to believe it more that “left to our own devices, we’re unlikely to bother to check year-old digital detritus” (38); I must have the particular weird habit of it, then, because I do so regularly – and use AIM logs to look at moments from before Facebook, although it’s rarer that I do that as they mostly chronicle intense and since-dissolved relationships.
I’ve also analyzed my Facebook usage through Wolfram Alpha and found that I average 8.5 likes and 3.4 comments per post over the past 300 or so posts, that my photo of a feminist power sign carved in a jack-o-lantern has been my most popular of all time (crossposted from Instagram, see below), and that as is probably common for queer progressives in large Northeastern US cities, my most significant friend groups are too intertwined and complicated for Wolfram Alpha’s friend-cluster tool to graph them effectively. I’ve also run my profile through Five Labs where keyword analysis suggests I am, among other things, inventive and intellectually curious…which I attribute 100% to the words “poetry” and “apparently” correlating with these traits.
I didn’t intend to talk about Facebook at much at all, but it was the most interesting source for data, and my inner technologist isn’t surprised: as we see in Thompson, the best personal data management right now exists when it’s entirely passive, when it’s a program given free run of a preexisting large mass of data, or when the user has some other reason to use whatever site or service is keeping records, some immediate benefit. I tried more focused lifelogging over the past week, having been looking for an excuse anyway: I downloaded Saga, a relatively completionist “automatic lifelogging app,” and found that incessantly checking in on and correcting the app’s glitchy GPS and non-Aristotelian sense of time (“no, I left at 10:30, I got home at 12:30, not 3:13…no, I wasn’t at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Charlestown, the T just stopped for a minute…what do you mean you have no data from 5AM last night, was I abducted from my bed last night”) might have helped my short-term memory, but it wasn’t nearly enough of a set-and-forget system to be worth using. Similarly, I tried a sleep app, designed to both track your sleep cycles – based on the way your body movements shake the bed and are registered on your smartphone’s accelerometer — and serve as a smart alarm, waking you within a certain time period when you’re already in light sleep. I couldn’t get enough interesting data from a week’s use to say anything; if I do continue using it, it’ll be because it serves the in-the-moment purpose of being a more soothing alarm clock.
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