When we read Kathrin Roeggla’s we never sleep, the interviewees were fully immersed in the parameters of the New Economy. Their work was dominating their lives, which lead to the vanishing of their privacy. Their private lives were almost perceived as a burden. When the value of human life is determined by efficiency, work, and self-discipline (we never sleep), we want to ask how a life changes when one tracks oneself and reduces one’s existence to a quantifying one. In Juli Zeh’s The Method this idea of quantifiability of human life is perfectionated. Through implanting a chip in the upper arm of the citizens of the dystopian healthcare dictatorship of the Method that allows creating a digital data double of each citizen that can be analyzed on a daily basis. The “Quantified Self (QS) is the term that embodies self-knowledge through self-tracking. The list of things that we can measure about ourselves is endless: among others, our heart rate, respiration, hours slept, or even the number of sneezes and coughs during a day. However, not all important things in life can be measured, and not everything that can be measured is important. QS really revolves around finding personal meaning in your personal data.”(https://qsinstitute.com/about/what-is-quantified-self/)

Documentation: For one week (7 days) you will create a data diary and track yourself. Focus on one aspect of your life and monitor yourself. For the final project, please submit your digital data diary and write a 3-page reflection upon your experiment. The reflection needs to be written in the form of a short research paper. In an introductory paragraph describing the parameters of your experiment.Research an app that can help you to track yourself. For example, download a life-logging app such as Instant, Journaly, Loca, Fit Time, and Sleepy to log your daily activities. Each day write a short paragraph about your data sharing experiment and how it grapples with the themes depicted in this course. How does your understanding of yourself shift during the experiment? For further information about the apps cf. Shashwat Pradhan, “5 Lifelogging apps for 2018: Keep track of your year,” January 14, 2018, https://emberify.com/blog/lifelogging-apps-2018/)

Reflection (3 pages):

• Frame your 3-page paper theoretically and define what a quantified self is. Then tackle the following questions: What are you measuring and why? What is the goal of your self-observation? What (self-)knowledge through self-tracking do you want to gain? When does data turn into valuable information for you?

• Critically analyze the, e.g. app that you used to support your self-surveillance project. Write a review. What happened to your personal data? What were the benefits of using this particular app? What are the limits of it?

• Stay in contact with your group members. What are similar outcomes of your (self-)surveillance project? In which ways are your results different? Include a final paragraph in
which you analyze your group-data.