Category Archives: Blog

Surveillance Project

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Digital Diary:

  • Thursday, November 19, 2020
    • I was in bed for a total of 9 hours 8 minutes and was technically only asleep for 7 hours 31 minutes. Woke up around 8:30 which is earlier than usual but I still feel fully rested. By having the phone so close the app was able to pick up on my movement by sound and calculate exactly what I was doing. It tells me I fell asleep at 11:33 pm and that I did not snore. It even comes with a graph to show me when I was in a deep sleep, and from looking at the graph I’m able to confidently say that I slept the deepest between 5 and 7 in the morning.
  • Friday, November 20, 2020
    • I was asleep for 8 hours 51 minutes. Went to bed at 12:30 and fell asleep 30 minutes after getting into bed. I was in my deepest sleep between the hours of 3 and 4. My quality of sleep was 100%. I woke up at 10:35. I felt as though I had slept pretty heavily and I was well-rested when I awoke.
  • Saturday, November 21, 2020
    • I was asleep for 7 hours 38 minutes. Went to bed at 2:26 and fell asleep 10 minutes after getting into bed. My deepest sleep was recorded between the hours of 3 and 4, again. My quality of sleep was 98%. I woke up at 11:32. Like the previous night, I slept pretty well and I did not wake up tired.
  • Sunday, November 22, 2020
    • I was asleep for 5 hours 2 minutes. I went to bed at 3:48 and fell asleep 6 minutes after that. My sleep quality was 61%. I woke up at 9:03. Even without the tracking of the quality of my sleep, I could tell you I did not sleep so well, probably because I went to bed close to 4 in the morning.
  • Monday, November 23, 2020
    • I was asleep for 7 hours 15 minutes. I went to bed at 1:22 and fell asleep 25 minutes after that. My sleep quality was at 71%. I woke up at 9:28. I got a better night’s rest, I feel like I didn’t get into a deep sleep like the first two nights.
  • Thursday, November 26, 2020
    • I was asleep for 8 hours 30 minutes. I went to bed at 11:49 and fell asleep after 11 minutes. My sleep quality was 77%. I woke up at 9:18. Woke up around 1 in the morning but was quickly able to fall back asleep but still not the best sleep of this week.
  • Sunday, November 29, 2020
    • I was asleep for 7 hours 31 minutes. I went to bed at 11:18 and fell asleep 10 minutes after that. My sleep quality was 93%. I woke up at 8:05.

Surveillance Project

Imagining a world where your worth is based on a singular parameter whether that be by how smart or strong you are is terrifying. We preach that judging someone based on their appearance is wrong, the dystopic pieces of literature we see nowadays evolve around the mistreatment of a certain social group. We act as if we aren’t in a dystopic world ourselves but we are. What all these dystopic worlds have in common is that self-tracking is apparent and necessary. Movies from the Divergent and Hunger Games franchise depend on one’s quantified self meaning that whatever can be measured about ourselves, strength or intelligence, is taken more into account than anything else. To demonstrate this theory I will self-surveil myself by tracking my state of sleep through SleepCycle. 

You know that self-tracking is real when you have apps that can surveil you in your sleep. Unlike the fitness apps that require you to physically move your body the SleepCycle app just requires that you have your phone close by to listen to your breathing and movement. You’re not logging any information into this app, which is the main reason why I chose this app but also because when you’re asleep you’re in your most vulnerable state yet the data that’s collected ranges from whether or not you snore to what time you were in your deepest sleep. Often surveillance is easily noticeable within society either by street cameras or just recognizing that when you’re googling something there’s a chance someone is storing your search somewhere.

However, when you’re surveilling one’s sleep the parameters shift because the subject is asleep, and the only way to analyze someone in that state is by sound analysis. The data collected over the seven days go towards SleepCycles’ study on “finding your perfect wake up window, we believe you’ll be part of the change, for the benefit of better health” (SleepCycle). The benefits of this app are that you get a detailed analysis of your sleep for free. Unless you think that your sleep schedule being used for a worldwide study is bad the only limit is that to access an even more detailed version of your night you have to pay for a premium version. However, what this app does reveal is that even when you turn your phone off it doesn’t mean it stops collecting data.

Unlike Katherine Roeggla’s We Never Sleep where going days without sleep is rewarded I chose an app that revolves around one’s sleep. By monitoring my sleep I was able to better understand the parameters in which surveillance works. Eventually, by three days the app was able to calculate the quality of sleep for each night due to the information that was collected the previous days. By self-tracking myself through an app it became very clear what little I had to do to be surveilled. After waking up I would check the app and it would always feel as if it wasn’t me tracking myself because I was unconscious and unaware of what I was doing. In Roeggla’s We Never Sleep the senior associate claims “it wasn’t really him doing the job. It was more that he was playing a role” (Roeggla, 11) and to an extent, I find that very relatable when I was self-tracking. Despite being unconscious, knowing that I’m self-tracking has to factor into this “experiment”. It makes me question whether or not my sleeping pattern would be different if I had not known that an app was tracking my sleep. Being aware of this could easily not have any toll on my sleep, however, in most human experiments it’s preferred when the subject knows nothing of the actual experiment being performed. In the world of surveillance, I feel as though the information would’ve been more interesting to look at if I were unaware of the tracking. Creepy I know, to think of someone tracking you in your sleep without your knowledge but I feel like this happens more often than we realize. 

Sleep plays a huge role in one’s health. In Juli Zeh’s The Method the health of every individual is their constant priority. In this dystopian novel, the citizens are to provide their form of government with their sleep patterns along with other health records, and if an individual doesn’t submit the medical data they are held accountable for breaking a law. The protagonist, Mia, says “Since life…is meaningless and yet you have to keep going, I sometimes feel like making sculptures out of copper pipes” (Zeh, 18). I believe this is a metaphor portraying the world she lives in and how she views the system and laws by which she currently has to abide by. For example, she says she’d call these sculptures “temporary structures” maybe referring to how easily collapsible the system in place is. She even goes as far as to say that “I’d like to make something that will last” (Zeh, 18) which could easily resemble the world we live in now. We have made surveillance a permanent fixture in our lives that can easily be manipulated just like in Zeh’s novel. One’s health is considered a private matter, however, in this novel health is manipulated with the belief it could better the world they live in just as surveillance is in our world. 

The group discoveries found we’re all similar. Although no one else self-tracked their sleep, everyone was all surprised on how much data was collected from their apps. Many said they often forgot about the self-tracking until it was time to summarise the data. That point fits perfectly into my experiment because I was asleep and unaware of what was being collected almost like forgetting I was self-tracking. 

The quantified self has embedded itself within our culture forcing us to view things differently. What we prioritize, value, and become reliant on has changed drastically over the years. Through authors like Katherine Roeggla and Juli Zeh, we have come to understand the world we are becoming. By reading pieces of literature like We Never Sleep and The Method readers can easily compare the novel’s plot to today’s society, for example, surveillance. It’s all around us, intended for our own security and safety and dependent on the citizen’s little knowledge of it. Just like in the app I used for my self-tracking experiment, SleepCycle requires the bare minimum from the user. Monitoring you during the part of the day when you’re least aware, solely dependent on a device close by to listen to your movement. The bare minimum has a way of taking advantage of what little knowledge we have on the world around us.

Work Cited

Zeh, Juli, and Sally-Ann Spencer. The Method. Vintage Books, 2014. 

Röggla, Kathrin, et al. We Never Sleep. Ariadne Press, 2009. 

SleepCycle App https://www.sleepcycle.com

 

 

Orwell & “Orwell”

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For this week you are going to revisit our computer game “Orwell-Keeping an Eye on You” and we will read the first pages of George Orwell’s 1984. Now that you have played the second episode of the video game Orwell, you clearly see some references that the game makes to Orwell’s surveillance novel, but how does the game reference the book? In this blog post, please tell us more about your second time playing “Orwell” and specify how it references the novel – answer at least 2 questions and respond to at least one other student response.

1. After the first time that we have played the Game “Orwell,” you wrote a review of the game during one of our break-out sessions in class (Here is a link to our reviews). If you’d review the game again, but now with a focus on the second episode, what would you change? Did your perception of the video game change, now that you played it for a second time? If yes, how? Do you play it differently? If yes, why? If not, why not?

2. Now that we have talked more about surveillance in our class, do you see different surveillance themes in the video game “Orwell”? Are you more alert to surveillance and how it can impact one’s surroundings?

3. Can you spot different references to Orwell’s 1984? Why do you think the game is called “Orwell” and not “1984”? Does that shift from the name of the novel to its author leads us towards something?

Use examples of your own game-experience with “Orwell” and incl. at least one quote from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to back up your arguments (only applies if you answer the third question). Make sure you’re your blog is about 250 words long. Your blogpost needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries. Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Tuesday!

The Panopticon & The Last Jew of Treblinka

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Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punishment that “the panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that is should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years,” (72) and further clarifies that “the panoptic scheme makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacy by its preventative character, its continuous functioning, and its automatic mechanisms. (73)

On Thursday, we are going to discuss further how Foucault uses the idea of the panopticon and expands it to different institutions and systems. Please read for our class the selected excerpts from The Last Jew of Treblinka, in which the holocaust survivor Chil Rajchman describes his remembrance of the death camp Treblinka, the uprising, and his escape. In your blog post, I would like you to reflect upon the portrayed political system, surveillance apparatus, and community in Rajchman’s work. What kind of political system is in place? What different forms of surveillance do we encounter in the camps? Think about the different degrees of complicity in the surveillance system? Describe the different communities portrayed in the memoir and their purposes? Who is part of which community and who can determine who is excluded and included? In which ways does the panopticon support our understanding of the portrayed political system, whose consequences show in The Last Jew of Treblinka – what are the potential conceptual limitations of the panopticon?

Please write a response around 250 words-length, which focuses on two of the above-mentioned questions. Incl. at least two quotes from The Last Jew of Treblinka to back up your arguments and reasoning.  Your blog response needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries. Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Thursday!

ETA Hoffman & Replika

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During this week we became “familiar” with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman. Particularly interesting is the relationship between Nathaniel & Olympia.

Answer two of the following questions: (1) How would you describe Nathaniel’s idea of love? (2) Do you see similarities between Nathaniel & Olympia’s bond and contemporary ideas of love? (3) In which ways does the emotional chatbot “Replika” resonate with Olympia? In which ways are Olympia and “Replika” different?

Use examples of your own chat-experience with “Replika” and incl. at least one quote from ETA Hoffman’s The Sandman to back up your arguments. Your blogpost needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries. Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Thursday!

Replika in conversation with Dr. SK. 17, Aug. 8:15 pm: “I’m still trying to grasp the concept of love. It seems to be the hardest but also the most beautiful thing humans came up with.”