 Hvis jeg skal tale om arbejde, har jeg gjort et par år med Mathias Bode, og det er ikke et meget intensivt arbejde, men det har været for 4 år. Vi har været med i den kvantifærdige selfgruppe i Copenhagen, og jeg har været interessant ved at se i en lang tid på, hvad der sker, når folk starter selvfølgelig. Og i dag har vi talet om neoliberalismen, og jeg tror, at mange af det, som sker i en kvantifærdige selfgruppe, virker meget godt med, hvad vi taler om i neoliberale teorier. For eksempel, at folk taler om at være responsivere for dem selv, at tage deres hjælp i vores egen hjælp, og de vil mange dem selv. Men når man ser det i en lang tid, så kan det være, at det bliver mere kompleks, og det er det, jeg vil tale om i dag. Vi taler om optimisering, og det er interessant, fordi det er en term, at folk bruger meget. Vi taler hele tiden om, at de vil optimisere dem selv. Det er interessant, selvfølgelig, fordi det er self-trækking. Det går til en generelt tendensi i dag, hvor folk taler meget om at bruge teknologi til at optimisere dem selv. Så vi kan også tale om, for eksempel, medi-kellenhansning, kosmetisk søgeri, andre færdige færdige færdige færdige. Og det går også til den sted, som du kunne kojne optimiseringen, hvor folk vil gøre mest af sin liv. Så optimisering er brugt for at bruge mest af liv, og en strategi om at gøre mest af liv på en fysisk, ekonomisk, socialt, mentalt og spirituelt niveau. Det interessant, selvfølgelig, er, at denne koncept har en anden historie, fordi originalt var det ikke fra den humære area, men fra computer science, publik management, hvor den mener, at det er en selektion af en bedre element. Men i de seneste år, den termen har været populiseret, som har tilføjet mikrofysisk af hverdage liv, og i dag er folk grønligt at tale om, hvordan at optimisere liv, hvordan at gøre mest af dem selv. Hvis vi går til litteratur, denne tendensi har blivet indtænkt med flere skoler, f.eks. Niklas Rose, og han introducerer den termen teknologi af optimiseringen. Og hvad han har sagt, er, at i dag har vi en masse teknologi, som vi ikke bruger, fordi vi vil køre disease, men vi bruger dem, fordi vi er interesseret i kontrolere processer af body og mind. Så det er nyt ikke så meget teknologi i sig, det er ikke trækning i sig, men han har sagt, at vi har tænkt, hvad han kalder de ægste af biologisk kontrol. Så vi er, at vi er, at vi er, at vi er, at vi er grønligt grønligt, tilvendt oss selv, og tilvendt vores body. Selvfølgelig, Emilie Martin, har aldrig brugt termen optimisering, han har også beskyttet socialt processer, som taber ind i konceptet af optimiseringen. F.eks. han har sagt, at der er en konsekvenser af det trækning af socialt institution. Folket kommer til at spise om dem selv som mini-corporationer, som projekter, der må være investeret i, nødvendt, menneskt og svært. Det, vi ser på vores arbejde, er, hvordan folk bringer de present til fritiden med teknologiske, så de intervjener i sin egen liv, med at bruge selvfølgelig teknologiske. Jeg tænkte i dag, at vi skulle prøve at sige om de kvalificerede selv, men vi har ikke faktisk prøvet at sige det. Jeg ved ikke om, om du er familie med grupper. Den er origineret i 2007, hvor Kevin Kelly og Gary Wolf startede det, som kvalificerede selvmovement med et kvarsk, kunstighed. Næste dag har de næste dag med mere end 207 grupper i over 35 lande. The Danish Group of Self-Quantifiers started as a digital platform in May 2012, and I went to the first meeting. The active participation in the group takes the form of participation in meetings, where the members share their experiences with technology. Among a preferred topic is the sharing of experience with testing new technology, the impact it has on everyday life and general well-being. Today they are organizing the 14th meeting. This is from today. There are more than 300 members, but at normal meetings there are only between 20-40 people participating. And there is a really like a small core group, mostly people who works professionally with software or with health. Then there are normally a couple of students showing up, and then there are people who are tracking because they have medical problems. I'm not going to talk specifically about these today because it's a bit of a different argument. So I'm mostly going to talk about the people who go to the meeting because they just find the topic interesting and they want to explore themselves or try to self-track. Okay, so I have gone to participant, I've done participant observation in meetings for about four years. And the meeting normally has the format what is called show and tell. So there's three questions that all people have to go to. Firstly, what did you do? Secondly, how did you do it? And thirdly, what did you learn? I just want you to show a small clip from one of the meetings. It's in Danish. So no, not all of you will understand, but just to get a sense of how they present themselves. And you might see me in the back. I had a bit longer hair. And it's very convenient to do this kind of data collection because this clip is on YouTube. So I didn't even have to take the note myself. I can just go to YouTube and find the meeting. And he's talking very, very excited about and inside he got from tracking his running pattern and weighing himself. So he wanted to lose weight and he went on a diet and then he also started to run and to weigh himself. And then he looked at how the curve correlated each day. And in this clip he shows the point where he runs so much that his diet is actually having effect. So he shows this really, really exciting point on the graph where his weight starts to fall. And to him he says that this was a really fantastic moment because in that moment it became fun being on a diet. This thing I've seen is so tangible, so concrete that you can see yourself from the outside. It makes, for instance, such a thing as losing weight, much funnier. So in that phase he was really positive and very curious about self tracking. So if you go to how the people who started the quantified self formulate what it's all about, they say. The self is just our operation sensor, our consciousness, our moral compass. So if you want to act more efficiently in the world we have, effectively in the world we have to know ourselves better. So the idea is that if you want to approve as a human being, you have to identify an area where you want to improve. And then you have to quantify it. And if you can quantify it, you can improve it. Of course it's interesting to ask what kind of self is this actually. So we have tried to explore this process. And in the work we did, anatting we wrote two years ago, we came to the three first steps, where we firstly saw how people actually used the technology, how they started to have this visual feedback where they could actually start to see themselves from outside. We also saw how they started to experience the body in this process. And then we also saw how they related to the data. This winter I went back and I tracked some of the self tracker we interviewed a couple of years ago. And this is completely new. So I've just been looking at the interviews last week. So this part of the presentation will be a bit of work in progress. Because it's actually quite surprising to hear what they have come to and how they use it today. So going back to the start. So the first process is what we call enactment. So here we have a really, really positive self tracker. And he says, if you want a progressive life where you are moving constantly, this is a way to do it. Of course it does not work for all of us, but for me personally it is difficult to sit down and think, what do I want to change next year and then make some arbitrary goal. I need something concrete and something I can quantify. Then tracking becomes interesting. The group around is not as such very interesting. I'm more interested in goals and rules, frames and consequences. It is a tool and anchor point to write things down or register. That at least is my interest for the time being. But then he says, but that interest might also fade by time. So we see here that in the start at least this person is very positive. He believes that through tracking he can read and see himself. So here you can really see what we have talked about today. The kind of datified other that emerged. So he sees himself in the data. The aim is to get insights into the self. It's also to identify blind angles to know what you are really doing. For instance, you think you eat quite healthily, but if you take a photograph of everything you eat and upload it on eatery, you might find out that you have a bit of a distorted deception of how healthy you actually eat. So it's very much about documenting yourself and your own practices. So what is tracked? A lot of things are tracked. In the self tracking movement or group in Denmark, I heard about a lot of things, weight, food, sleep, calories, steps. There are also some other there and they track for instance how many times they breastfeed. And they also track how many times they have changed the diaper. But what is interesting is that what people track seems to change by time. So to go back to the process of tracking. So for most people it starts with the use of one app. For instance being sleep circle. And then they see the self visualized in the curves. So for instance this is a picture of the quality of sleep of one night. Then they start to correlate it with other data. So for these people it's not so much the data themselves. It's a bit more advanced because they want to correlate different data sets. So for instance how is my sleep related to for instance my well-being, my cognitive performance, my productivity. And then they look at this data and then they get a better insight of themselves. In the article we wrote a couple of years ago we called it the digital doppelganger. So we saw this relationship between the data and the self. And how they established this kind of dialogue and increasingly got to what they call know themselves better. So in this part is very much about experiencing yourself through the data. For instance one say generally these are things that you already know, but it gives you something to have it measured objectively. You are then confronted with it in the visualization. It gives a kind of insight or at least a feeling of aha. And then you connect from this. It might not be a surprise that it took you from 30 to 45 minutes to fall asleep. But wow, now it's in the document and on the screen. So they increasingly get to know themselves better. So for many of the informant it was a comparable to initiate a process of self discovering. To see the correlation between different data sets. Metta, a self tracker on 39 talks about how it affects the senses. According to her in normal everyday life people tend to see things very black and white. And let the mood affect how they respond to the world. This also somehow affects or distort the perception of who they really are. So people act according to an image they have of themselves. Tracking according to her means becoming conscious of who she really is. So it's all about making check, ask yourself how am I doing and then let the data speak. So she talks about that gradually it's possible to merge the two track. So looking at the data set and your normal self you can be much more conscious of who you really are. Some talk about that it gives a better overview. Another person also talk about that is sort of having a kind of encyclopedia of the self. So it's all there. You have the history of yourself. But what is interesting is that increasingly when I have seen people track for longer time there start to be some sort of entanglement. So in a way you can say that the technology somehow enter into a dialogue with the human side and they start to have some sort of like almost like a dialogue. Firstly what is interesting is that people talk about that when they start to track they get much more aware of the body. So they start to sense the body much more. Like Joen we just saw he talked about after tracking. For instance if he was eating he really tasted the thing. So he felt like he's generally his senses there were much more active. And that came as a bit of surprise for me. So it's very much about raising the bodily sensitivity and awareness. But it's also interesting because at one point they also talk about that they start having a conflict or tension between the two self. For instance what they are tracking is it actually something that they that relates to what they want to be or become. For instance we had a person who tracked time because he wanted to be much more productive. And then he found out that being productive didn't really make him happier. He felt that it didn't give him any life quality. So it didn't really align with his general goals. So he sort of changed his goal. And another thing they are also asking about is whether they have become a number junkie. Because in order for this to work and to get this story of the self, this encyclopedia, you have to do it every day. Because if you miss a day you can make the graph. So they somehow become very like dependent on tracking every day. And another thing they also start to discuss is how it actually influenced the experience. So how is it for instance running in your own fort, seeing nature, and then having the app. How does it change the experience? Another guy used technology when he was meditating. So he was all the time checking his pulse to see if he was really relaxed, to see if the meditation was effective. But then he found out that the whole idea about meditation was like being in the now, and just like forgetting about things on the outside. So it was actually destroying the meditation experience. So they started increasingly having this kind of dialogue between what the data do to them and what they actually want to do with themselves and the human value. And now we are coming to my latest work and that I started this Christmas. So now I am trying to track the self tracker I interviewed. And not all of them has been interested in talking to me. This is an email from Joan that you saw in the first presentation, who was showing very excited about when he actually started to work. And he writes me, dear daughter, I would like to help, but I have not much to tell you. Currently I am in a sort of tracking limbo. My variables stop functioning and I am waiting for the newest Apple iwards. I still weigh myself every morning, but I do not use the data actively. They have sort of slide into the background as a kind of personal data patchwork I can return to if needed. I still use my telephona app while running, but I do not really pay attention to the data I collect. They are just there. So increasingly we see somehow that where we saw before, that people like really get into using the technology, the feel that they get to know. There comes sort of tension and increasingly a kind of separation from the technology. And there are a lot of things that they talk about. And this is from the four people I have interviewed so far. And they all talk about similar experience. Firstly they talk about the time that you use so much time. So if you really want to self-track and you want to get something out of it, you have to use and invest so much time. Secondly they talk about the data overload. What to do with all this number. And here I have a quote for one who said, how much did I actually get out of carrying that device? I had to charge it, look after it. It was a fun thing to talk about, to meet other people, interchange experience about tracking. But I had to realize that it did not really look at the numbers, rather it had become a burden. So they are talking a lot about what to actually do with all this numbers, all this data. How can they actually make sense of it? Many of them got a moment of revelation. For instance, when Jung was tracking, and they feel that it really helped them, but then they haven't invented themselves again. So it's like some sort of aspect they got to know of themselves. And now they really are not really into finding more things to track. So they also talk about the reduced experience, that it became almost like an obsession. And what a lot of them talks about, that it restricts activities. For instance, the guy, he used verbal, but he wanted to do things with his kids, and his son he liked to swim, and he couldn't swim with it. So he felt that there was a lot of things he couldn't do when he was tracking. So he actually gave up tracking when he was spending time with his son. Ja, so this why I just took the picture of the genus head, because when I talked to, like for instance Jung in 2013, he was very much oriented towards the future, about optimizing, losing weight, getting knowledge. And then when I talked to him, the thing has like just lost its significance. Or there were more like some sort of background. So the technology was not foreground anymore, it was background. But when I asked them, but did you then just waste your time? The people I talked to, they said no, in no way. Because this was actually a process that was needed to get to know themselves. So like a guy here again, he says, it's a process where data plays a part. I started tracking, I had a rather vague sense of whether my idea about myself did correspond to reality. By using data you can adjust your attention and then radicate some prejudice about yourself. But I think optimization of data give a rather limited additional information to what we already know about ourselves. But it helps us to start looking at ourselves. But in the end we do not really need the data to find the answers. So for instance in this case he talks very much as tracking as some sort of process or phase that serves to calibrate knowledge about oneself. What is also interesting that the people I talk to now, they all talk about that they have moved from optimizing hard value. For instance performing better, running faster, losing ways to more soft value. For instance optimizing things that you cannot quantify at being a good partner, having a good social life. So increasingly they become conscious about that what they really give them satisfaction assuming being was more like human value and not so much being productive. So you can say there's a move from productivity, efficiency to more focus on live quality and well-being. So just to sum up, before I was in a session on neoliberalism but it changed the title, but I think it could be interesting to take this case and discuss neoliberal values. Because on the one hand I think that this is really a good illustration of neoliberal values that they somehow conform. But on the other hand there's also a complete tension with neoliberal values. So it's not really tracking, at least for the people I talk to, it's not really something that is a value in itself. It's more something that you do to get to know yourself. They talk about calibrating the self, getting to know themself, modeling themself. So it has some sort of like fluid quality you could say. But it's not something that they wouldn't have done. They think that it has been really great and it has been a really, really useful experience. And I of course have to mention that a lot of them still track, but it's not on the, it's much more in the background. Okay. Yes, I think that is all.