We measure our successes and failures in units of practical value that we call wealth or status or fame. We sometimes even see everything in terms of its practical value, to the point that we see value itself as having a practical foundation.
To instead seek out what is impractical might seem almost quaint, as though it were for someone else — a different person living in a very different world. Sometimes we sense that there might be more to our lives than the practical, but this idea gets pushed out by the chorus of voices telling us to focus always on what’s practical.
A consequence of this is that it can sound like madness to insist there are moments when we must completely ignore the practical. Yet it is precisely by going beyond the realm of the practical that we become capable of discovering another kind of value, a value that does not depend on this or that, a value that cannot be quantified because it is immeasurable.
A look at how data, and the process of collecting it, can’t capture everything. A couple of examples:
The wider the user base for the data, the more decontextualized the data needs to be. Theodore Porter’s landmark book, Trust in Numbers, gives a lovely example drawn from a history of land measurement compiled by Witold Kula, the early twentieth-century Polish economist. Older measures of land often were keyed to their productivity. For example, a “hide” of land was the amount required to sustain the average family. Such measures are incredibly rich in functional information. But they required a lot of on-the-ground, highly contextual expertise. The land assessor needs to understand the fertility of the soil, how many fish are in the rivers and deer are in the woods, and how much all that might change in a drought year. These measures are not usable and assessable by distant bureaucrats and managers. Societies tend to abandon such measures and switch from hides to acres when they shift from local distributed governance to large, centralized bureaucracies. The demands of data—and certainly data at scale—are in tension with the opacity of highly local expertise and sensitivity. This kind of local awareness is typically replaced with mechanically repeatable measures in the movement to larger-scaled bureaucracy.
And:
Here is the second principle: every classification system represents some group’s interests. Those interests are often revealed by where a classification system has fine resolution and where it doesn’t. For example, the International Classification of Disease (ICD) is a worldwide, standardized system for classifying diseases that’s used in collecting mortality statistics, among other things. Without a centralized, standardized system, the data collected by various offices won’t aggregate. But the ICD has highly variable granularity. It has separate categories for accidents involving falling from playground equipment, falling from a chair, falling from a wheelchair, falling from a bed, and falling from a commode. But it only has two categories for falls in the natural world: fall from a cliff, and an “other fall” category that lumps together all the other falls—including, in its example, falls from embankments, haystacks, and trees. The ICD is obviously much more interested in recording the kinds of accidents that might befall people in an urban industrial environment than a rural environment, note Bowker and Star. The ICD’s classification system serves some people’s interests over others.
We want to be successful, so we are always thinking about our goals… We measure and evaluate and plan everything we do for the purpose of fulfilling our goals. These goals might be significant projects that will take months or years to complete, but they can also be so small that we don’t even realize they are goals. Our compulsion towards measurement and progress is so strong that we might even go so far as to plan out our spare time to achieve the best possible outcome, even if it is just to maximize the pleasure we experience.
Our focus on goals can also creep into our efforts to become more aware of ourselves and the world around us… But in doing so, we work against ourselves.
We put enormous emphasis on optimizing quantities. Our attention is shackled to screens where we make certain numbers go up and other numbers go down. We want to measure everything so that we can control and optimize it. The benefit of this is that we are able to fulfill our material needs more efficiently and with less effort.
But by doing so, we begin to think only about quantities. We create incentives to sacrifice quality in order to obtain better quantitative results. We become so focused on measuring and optimizing, on increasing efficiency and productivity, that we stop thinking about what is happening to us in our day-to-day lives.
It is perhaps not surprising that we then feel there is something missing — as though life is not going as well as it ought to be, even though all of the numbers are moving in the right direction.
The debate about Intelligence is much like the debate about Art: people who can’t define it want to judge about it, and in their ignorance, numbers come to the rescue.
The Displacement of Abstraction.—Before the rise of modern quantitative science, the quantitative aspects of science were treated as being of little relevance, while the anthropocentric impacts of phenomena, including the projection of anthropic properties onto natural phenomena, were treated as that which demanded explanation. The explanatory power of Aristotelian science, if it possessed any, derived from its abstractions and reductions as applied to anthropic properties of the world. The rise of modern science in its quantitative form neatly reversed this distribution of what is to be explained, what is to be abstract, and what is to be concrete. Now the anthropic properties of the world are treated as being of little relevance, while the focus of abstraction and reductive explanation is on the quantitative features of the world.
“It is easy to take for granted the value of data. It has come to seem self-evidently useful, as necessary and natural as water. It doesn’t even matter what has been measured and datafied; data in the abstract, as an idea, is taken to be a good thing, and of course there should be more of it, to enrich our knowledge of the world and to make anything that is “data-driven” work better. If data is being collected but not leveraged, why bother? Why have an archive of implosion images if not to simulate any implosion image imaginable?
But to accept that at face value would be to neglect the vast infrastructure involved not merely in collecting it and making it useful and tradable, but also establishing its reputation for objectivity. Measurement is an ideology; among its central tenets is that there is no such thing as datafication but just data itself, naturally given by the things in themselves. It presents itself as a form of representation that transcends representation: Data is no longer about the world but is instead taken to be the world itself, as though materiality were a matter not of atoms but of information. The image of an implosion is an implosion.
Likewise, this ideology would persuade us to ignore the market for data, which shapes what is measured and how, and have us believe it is more like a natural resource, a found material waiting for refinement rather than a structured informational good without any natural status at all. Implosions just happen.
Calls to measure everything and collect as much data as possible are offered as efficient strategies to better grasp the world as it is. But measurement is an act of power, not observation. Datafication always reifies an existing distribution of power that grants the measurers the ability to decide which aspects of the world count and which ones don’t. Having measurements taken as objective — having representations be treated as realities — requires power and recurrent processes of legitimation.”
…
Restating that in the terms outlined above, an archive recognizes the power relations intrinsic to measurement (and representation in general) whereas a dataset suppresses them (helping entrench the power relations that underwrite the data it assembles). An archive attempts to retain how and why representations were made, and a dataset disregards all that to allow representations to masquerade as universal facts. When representations become data, they reinforce the utility of the infrastructures (algorithmic decision-making systems, AI models, etc.) developed to exploit them. And that infrastructure in turn reinforces the power relations authorizing the data.
Manga drawn on the cover of my graduationgraduation thesis
“He was extremely wary of ‘making. His job is to “say”. In fact, he only said But what a lively way of saying it! It was a description that would have been impossible for anyone but someone with abnormal imaginative vision. Sometimes he is so afraid of “creating” that he re-reads what he has already written and cuts out the phrases that he thinks make the historical characters move like real people. Then, the person certainly stops breathing. You don’t have to worry about “making” it. But what is “statement” to describe different humans as the same? When he thinks about it, he can’t help but make use of the deleted words. After putting it back together and reading it over, he finally calms down. ”
“Ri Ling: Atsushi Nakajima’'（中島敦）
What I want to pay attention to is the part of "statement of a different person as a different person”. This is where my dissatisfaction with current urban engineering comes from. In other words, what does 500 liters/person/day, which is calculated as the maximum water supply per person per day, mean? There are many types of people in the world, some people use only 100l a day, some fools use 1000l. It’s called individuality, but the “basic unit” of 500l/person/day originates from erasing individuality.
The historian Sima Qian’s problem still remains relevant today. I absolutely cannot allow a study that kills individuality. The operation of “quantification” is a double-edged sword in that sense. If someone who doesn’t know how to use it gets their hands on it, this sword becomes an extremely dangerous weapon.
Phenomena in the natural world are basically curvilinear, and when they tried to replace them with easy-to-understand forms—straight lines—the seeds of Western scientific civilization arose. However, even for the simplest curve, the circle, the π was a number (transcendental numbers) that could not be handled by triangle approximation. The Western conscience has the clarity to make the impossible impossible. But fools assume that a straight line divides all curves. There can only be “destruction”!
<< Fechner’s ideas would also quickly be materialized in the newly appearing sensing machines of his time—instruments with strange sounding names like kymographion, tachistoscope, or chronoscope, which measured or graphically represented things like blood pressure, the speed of vision, or response time. In the words of the 19th-century French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, a major inventor of such devices, these new instruments sought to reveal the hidden “language of nature.” Such human sensory measuring devices were to be found in a novel kind of experimental scientific environment: the emerging experimental psychology laboratories in Europe and the United States, whose goal was to create a new kind of human being: quantifiable, calculable, and predictable.
We might assume that psychophysics died a dusty death, relegated to the history books of psychology and the crumbling sets of abandoned scientific instruments that fill up university collections. But as our LinkedIn search reveals, psychophysics is very much alive in the most unimagined of places. In the labyrinths of behavioral research at Facebook Reality Labs, for example, scientists with Ph.D.s in neuroscience, applied perception research, robotics, and computer science still draw (albeit with updates) on the quantitative modeling of sensation, stimuli, and perception that Fechner discovered in the late 19th century in their 21st-century aims to create VR, AR, and XR experiences that are both exceedingly real and, at the same time, completely artificial. >>
<p>The underlying principle – that any human endeavour can be usefully reduced to a set of statistics – has become one of the dominant paradigms of the 21st century. The historian of capitalism Jerry Z Muller calls it “metric fixation”, a ubiquitous concept that pervades not only the private sector, but also the less-quantifiable activities of the state, such as healthcare and policing.</p>
<p>“We live in the age of measured accountability, of reward for measured performance, and belief in the virtues of publicising those metrics through ‘transparency’,” writes Muller. And although, as he stresses, measurement itself is not a bad thing, “excessive measurement and inappropriate measurement” will distort, distract and destroy what we claim to value.</p>
<p>At the turn of the 20th century, this system was augmented further by two complementary concepts: scientific management and mass production. The latter is best encapsulated by the work of auto-maker Henry Ford, whose low-priced Model T reshaped not only industrial practice but American culture, helping create a prosperous middle class that defined itself by mass consumption. Ford claimed that his assembly lines, which kept workers static while material moved through their stations on conveyor belts, had been inspired by an aide’s visit to a Chicago slaughterhouse. There, the aide observed the opposite process: a “disassembly line” in which a row of butchers took apart pig carcasses, joint by joint, with each individual focusing on a single repetitive task.</p>
<p>This compartmentalisation of labour led to the scientific management movement, pioneered by efficiency-obsessed engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who advocated a set of working practices now known as Taylorism. Taylor and his followers observed labourers and broke down the flow of their work into constituent parts that could then be standardised. The aim, said Taylor, was to “develop a science to replace the old rule-of-thumb knowledge of the workmen”. Importantly, this also necessitated a transfer of knowledge – and a corresponding shift in power – from the labourers who carried out the work to the managers who oversaw it.</p>
<p>Writing in the New York Times in 2010, the technology journalist Gary Wolf heralded our age of quantification. Using data to make decisions is now the norm in nearly all spheres of life, he wrote. “A fetish for numbers is the defining trait of the modern manager. Corporate executives facing down hostile shareholders load their pockets full of numbers. So do politicians on the hustings, doctors counselling patients and fans abusing their local sports franchise on talk radio.” Business, politics and science are all steered by the wisdom of what can be measured, said Wolf, and the reason why is obvious: numbers get results, making problems “less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually”. Only one domain has resisted the lure of quantification: “the cozy confines of personal life”. That, said Wolf, would soon change.</p>
<p>Thanks to new technology – namely, the ability to digitise information, the ubiquity of smartphones and the proliferation of cheap sensors – humans now have historically unprecedented powers of self-measurement. At the turn of the 17th century, in order to better understand the workings of his metabolism, the Italian physician Santorio Santorio constructed a set of giant scales in which he could sit. Santorio would measure his weight constantly, particularly before and after meals and defecation. Today, we are rewarded with floods of comparable information with minimal effort. We can track our sleep, exercise, diet and productivity with apps and gadgets. We have become beacons of unseen measurement, emitting quantified data as heedlessly as uranium produces radiation.</p>
<p>For Wolf, the potential of this information is huge. “We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyse a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election,” he writes. “Why not use numbers on ourselves?” His article is the nearest thing to a manifesto for the Quantified Self movement: a loose affiliation of individuals whose pursuit of “self-knowledge through numbers” shows how far we have internalised the logic of measurement. The movement’s origins can be traced back to the 1970s, when enthusiasts cobbled together the clunky ancestors of today’s wearable tech. But the idea came to greater public attention after Wolf and fellow journalist Kevin Kelly coined the term “quantified self” in 2007 and founded a non-profit to proselytise their ideas.</p>
<p>When thinking about measurement in today’s world, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa suggests it is characteristic of a particular 21st-century desire: to structure our lives through empirical observation, rendering our interests and ambitions as a series of challenges to overcome. “Mo untains have to be scaled, tests passed, career ladders climbed, lovers conquered, places visited, books read, films watched, and so on,” he writes. “More and more, for the average late modern subject in the ‘developed’ western world, everyday life revolves around and amounts to nothing more than tackling an ever-growing to-do list.”</p>
<p>This mindset, says Rosa, is the result of centuries of cultural, economic and scientific development, but has been “newly radicalised” in recent years by digitalisation and the ferocity of unbridled capitalist competition. Measurement has been rightly embraced as a tool to better understand and control reality, but as we measure more and more, we encounter the limits of this practice and wrestle with its disquieting effects on our lives.</p>
Macroscopical and microscopical analysis of selected Indian medicinal plants and HPTLC method for quantification of chemical markers in a polyherbal formulation
Macroscopical and microscopical analysis of selected Indian medicinal plants and HPTLC method for quantification of chemical markers in a polyherbal formulation. https://jppres.com/jppres/pdf/vol10/jppres21.1179_10.2.253.pdf #Pharmacy #Pharmacognosy
Image: pixabay
Article published in the Journal of Pharmacy & Pharmacognosy Research 10(2): 253-269, 2022.
Karunanithi Shalini1, Kaliappan Ilango2*
1Department of Pharmacognosy. SRM College of Pharmacy, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur-603 203, Chengalpattu (Dt), Tamil Nadu, India.
2Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. SRM College of Pharmacy, SRM Institute of…
Most everyone in the critical-studies and eco-critical pantheon — from Socrates to Marx to Arendt to Derrida; from Carolyn Merchant to Rachel Carson, Bakhtin to Bookchin — worried about this kind of calculative abstraction, taking us away from the material, real effects of what it is we are quantifying, counting, calculating about.
The Western model of the universe is political, and engineering or architectural. And therefore as one understands the operations of a machine by analysis of its parts, by separating them into their original bits, we have “bitted” the cosmos, and see everything going on in terms of bits, bits of information. And I have found that this is an extremely fruitful enabling us to control what is happening. After all, the whole of Western technology is the result of “bitting.” And so we “thing” the world, that is to say that in order to measure a curve you have to reduce it to point instance, and apply the calculus, so in exactly the same way, in order to discuss or talk about the universe you have to reduce it to things. But each thing, or “think,” is, as it work, one grasp of that spotlight, going (yeh-yeh-yeh) like this, you see. So, we reduce the infinite wiggliness of the world to grasps, or bits, we are getting back to biting, you see, the idea of teeth, to grasp of thoughts. So we thereby describe the world in terms of things, just as that fisherman could describe his view by the number of net-hole over through which the view was showing
<p>I often think about that principle when, as a designer, I consider aspect ratios of imagery. Why is everything a rectangle? There is a reason why cinema screens, televisions, and monitors are wider than they are tall. A rectangular plane in landscape orientation fits our biology. Our two eyes, spaced apart on our head as they are, create a wider periphery. We can see more horizontally than vertically without moving our heads. A square screen, large enough to be absorbingly “cinematic,” would have us literally moving our heads up and down continually in order to take in the visual information it displayed. The ergonomics of wide screens are obviously superior. The visual economy of the rectangle works its way inward, from the edges of the form to its contents. As many a web designer will lament, another day, another rectangle. But it’s worth pointing out that the complaint would be the same and certainly louder, if it were another day, another square. Symmetry of form is beautiful, but it isn’t always functional.</p>
<p>Symmetry of system, on the other hand, can be extremely efficient, even when it doesn’t correspond to nature. Because a square is perfectly symmetrical, it can be duplicated into infinity, creating a reliably consistent structure — a grid — in all directions. Grids help us to work within and upon nature, even when within nature no grids can be found.</p>
<p>As a child — and to this day — I was fascinated by maps and pages of text and easily transfixed by them. I often find myself drawn to pages and screens, for instance, not by their contents but by their form. By how the information is arranged. As a child, I didn’t realize that what I was actually looking at was the grid. The form of the page became a puzzle; I was in search of the system beneath it. The grid becomes another riddle for the eye. Most things we make we do so upon a grid, though the precision of their form can never match the abstract system beneath them. There’s a tension in that, one which provides endless provocation to anyone who looks.</p>
When a 2012 Microsoft patent filing posited a method for taking “the user through neighborhoods with violent crime statistics below a certain threshold,” it spurred a flurry of articles about whether such a project was racist. Yes, it was, but the bigger picture is how crime data may be used alongside data on purchasing histories, demographic information, and land prices to dictate where people live their lives. For example, the patent also described displaying in-car advertisements (“stop at a highway exit for a cup of coffee”) and then monitoring the driver to see if they made that purchase, so that the advertiser could be charged for the ad conversion. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where a driver originating from a poor part of town is steered with ads for rent-a-centers, check cashing, and fast food, or one in which a black-owned business is charged double for an ad conversion because there was an armed robbery in the vicinity two days ago. And so on. The various inputs that go into the value of a location for a particular transaction can be assessed and prices adjusted accordingly in a matter of minutes instead of years.
There are already highway toll lanes with dynamically adjusted congestion pricing, but dynamic pricing can easily move beyond the car. Amazon — an early leader in automating price discrimination — has already bought Whole Foods; how long before different customers are charged different prices for the same goods in physical grocery stores? How soon will a credit card reward system dictate your place in line for the doctors’ office, the DMV, or the breadline? How soon before paywalls go up around the public spaces we are used to crossing unhindered, before services that once seemed available to all on equal terms become subject to priority tiers?
Let’s call this emerging new normal the subscriber city: a set of technological, legal, financial, and marketing techniques that manage segregation for the purposes of capital accumulation and resource management. Cities have always been unequal, of course, but this has always been tempered by the time it took to reassess the value of land, years-long lease contracts, and the legal rights of tenants and homesteaders. The subscriber city would offer no such refuge: It would be able to wall off parts of the city on the fly without changing the physical landscape. Individuals would be unable to predict the behavior of doors, queues, and prices, as these would be subject to the whims of platform owners. One could be anywhere and suddenly find oneself outside looking in.
In areas of human activity where performance is difficult to quantify in an objective fashion, reputation
and networks of influence play a key role in determining access to resources and rewards. To understand
the role of these factors, we reconstructed the exhibition history of half a million artists, mapping out the
coexhibition network that captures the movement of art between institutions. Centrality within this
network captured institutional prestige, allowing us to explore the career trajectory of individual artists in
terms of access to coveted institutions. Early access to prestigious central institutions offered life-long
access to high-prestige venues and reduced dropout rate. By contrast, starting at the network periphery
resulted in a high dropout rate, limiting access to central institutions. A Markov model predicts the career
trajectory of individual artists and documents the strong path and history dependence of valuation in art.
Are we becoming too reliant on technology? The latest
phenomenon of wearable fitness trackers shows that we are becoming too obsessed
with the data we store about our bodies, in our watches and phones, thus disregarding
what our bodies really desire. Are we the experts of
our body or have we lost control?
Wearables are lightweight gadgets, such as the Fitbit, that
can be worn to self-monitor health, fitness and lifestyle data, for greater self-awareness
and thus control over the body. In 2016, 526 million people owned and wore a
wearable device worldwide. Nowadays, it is estimated that 1.1 billion people have
surrendered to the wearable craze and are beginning to view this luxury, as more
of a necessity.
Don’t get me wrong, to an extent, data tracking is effective,
when used for the desired fitness purpose. Wearables such as the Fitbit allow
self-tracking of steps, tailor physical activity goals, record workouts, be a part
of a community, track food intake, whilst also monitoring sleep patterns. These
gadgets also allow us to track biometric
data,
such as heart rate, blood oxygen and skin temperature. This can help improve
fitness levels when training to ensure we are working optimally, and in the
correct training zones, for the desired goals. They enable us to compare data throughout
a training programme and notice improvements, increasing motivation levels,
allowing the person to continue to push themselves. Fitbits offer so much more
than just being an effective, affordable fitness tool that they are now
becoming an accessory to life.
“There
is a big emphasis on data and numbers today,”
says Clark. “A sense that if we can quantify ourselves, we can really know
ourselves. But the numbers are never contextual. There is a danger of becoming
preoccupied by a number that doesn’t consider the whole picture of what is
going on in your day.”
If
you go for a run, does it count if you aren’t wearing your Fitbit? We are
beginning to believe that if we are unable to track our exercise and daily
steps then it never happened. We are converting our behaviours to numbers,
reducing the inaccuracies
and uncertainties of the human embodiment. Many owners of wearables
wear their watch 24/7 due to the functionality of them, because of their
ability to record from the first step of the day, right the way through the
night, as you sleep. This obsession has caused individuals to feel
frustrated and “naked” when
they aren’t wearing their watches or recording their data. Without the evidence
and ability to quantify are behaviours, it’s normalising
the objectification of the individual, preventing us from
exercising purely because of the kinaesthetic
experience. People before us were able to improve fitness without
this new technology so why are we so over-obsessed now?
Nudge Theory
Nudge
Theory is where a relatively indirect, subtle action encourages
people to adapt their behaviours, based on their broad self-interest and goals.
It is believed that without this ‘nudge’ then society is incapable
of making the ‘right’ decision. Nudges can be perceived as
neo-libertarian, as people are able to act freely in response to them,
therefore they seem consensual
rather than obligatory. Examples of this include gadgets such
as Smart Meters or internet purchases that we make. Smart meters track utility
bills and present how much energy and money a household is using. By owning
this technology, it may adapt our behaviours by prompting us to control how
much heat or water we use, to save money. Another example could be that data is
stored within the internet and knows that we may have purchased items at a
certain time during the month so will trigger pop-up’s advertising the same
product a month later. This could be items such as sanitary products, therefore
will prompt you to buy more for the following month. We may be completely
unaware that this personal data is being stored and it could be considered
invasive.
In the situation of Fitbits, a vibration is sent to the wrist, at 10 minutes to
the hour, to encourage the owner to walk the remainder of their steps f they
have not yet met their standardised goal. Without this vibration would we get
up and move around? This isn’t the worst idea to keep us moving and generally,
a very achievable goal to the average individual, however, when looking at the ontological
principles underlying these ‘nudges’, it can be seen that this external motivation
has such control over our behaviours that we change the way we act due to
increased pressure.
This ‘nudge’ may have the potential to discourage individuals
because it doesn’t take into account
the context or situation of
daily lives. The watch may vibrate to say there are
still 250 steps to complete, meaning you’ve been sitting down at your desk for
too long, although you had already completed 4,000 steps on your morning dog
walk. The Fitbit doesn’t consider your daily routine therefore, we may feel
ashamed for not reaching our goals. Although, wearing a Fitbit may encourage us
to take the stairs that day, rather than the lift, would this behaviour become
habitual if you stopped wearing it and nothing was dictating your normal routine
or implementing guilt? This shows that we are so consumed by quantifying ourselves
that we are dehumanising ourselves and not doing anything voluntarily, just
like cyborgs. Contradicting this, what happens if these altered behaviours
become embodied and there is no need
to monitor activity anymore? Fitbits would become a short-lived
piece of technology and a thing of the past.
Big Data
It
is becoming increasingly popular in places such as the USA, the UK and South
Africa for insurance companies and employers to use the small data we store in
our wearables on a larger scale. Insurance companies are offering life
insurance based on habits recorded in their Fitbits. However, how
can we be certain that the data being sent to these companies that is now
determining our financial outgoings is accurate and reliable? Wearables are not
considered as medical devices, measurements such as heart rate fluctuations are
not considered to be as accurate as an electrocardiography trace and many
owners say that their steps will increase, despite them not moving at all. Insufficient
investigations have been conducted on the accuracy of
wearables and a more disciplined testing approach is required before we can
rely on this data for insurance. There is also the danger of security breaches
with sensitive data such as this, by getting multiple companies involved with
the storage of health data.
Wearables are disruptive
It has been reported that the use of wearables causes
owners to feel disrupted
from their activity. This is because of the environment they were exercising in
due to distracting notifications and vibrations from their device, pushing them
to exercise at a higher
intensity, for longer. They found it demotivating and increased
their perception of effort
and tiredness, if their bodies weren’t up to the task. In
the age where we critique, particularly the younger generation, for large
amounts of ‘screen-time’, it appears slightly hypocritical that we are
justifying allowing ourselves to be consumed by our wearables, purely because
of the perspective that they are enabling greater self-awareness and control
over our bodies.
10,000 steps
Are
we physically benefiting from our Fitbits? It could be considered that we all
have this perception that if we all buy some form of wearable, we will
magically change our habits and become healthier. However, the extent that we
respond to this purchase will vary and what may benefit one person, may not be
the same for everyone. As a society, we appear to have a large amount of trust
in popular technology. This could be due to a positive recommendation from a reliable friend or just a general awareness of
the product’s popularity, feeding an impulse to be on trend and benefiting
also. The
default goal of the number of steps a person should do to improve fitness is
10,000 steps, however there is no research to support that this is an adequate
amount steps because every individual is different and may require more or less
than this. This number stemmed from a marketing campaign by a Japanese company
selling a pedometer called the Manpo-kei, “man” meaning
10,000, “po” meaning steps and kei meaning “meter”.
The number of sales of this
pedometer was successful therefore, the number seemed to stick, as the
universal goal for fitness, however there is no scientific evidence that this
is correct, and every individual will vary. Although individuals may not be
physically benefiting from this goal, there are potential psychological
benefits because individuals will be striving for a goal and will gain positive
reinforcement,
once rewarded from achieving this. Contradicting this, if people are unable to reach
this goal due to lifestyle reasons, they can feel demotivated and are more
likely to stop using their device. The default step target on a Fitbit is
10,000, however this doesn’t account for factors such as age or fitness level,
therefore steps will vary from person to person.
Wearables and motivation levels
As little as 50% of young people engage
in enough physical activity, therefore substantial action and innovation
of ideas are required to promote exercise to increase engagement of young
people in sport. The younger generation have shown an increased reliance on mobile
devices and other technology. This highlights the potential to combine the use
of fitness tools such as Fitbits, with a healthy physical lifestyle that
promotes exercise and increases motivation. This theory was investigated with the purpose
being to analyse whether Fitbits impacted adolescent’s motivation levels to
physical activity. Each participant was given a Fitbit to wear for 8 weeks,
then they were asked to complete a questionnaire, assessing motivation levels and
need satisfaction of the gadget. Results showed that there was a decrease in
need satisfaction of the Fitbit and in autonomous motivation, an increase in
amotivation due to increased comparisons between participants, creating
competition due to increased levels of guilt and internal pressure.
Self-determination Theory
Self-determination
theory provides an understanding of the initiation and maintenance of physical
activity. Individuals show greater signs of self-determination when they are
internally motivated to adapt their behaviour, due to their own interest. This
is also known as autonomous behaviour. However, the investigation, as mentioned
previously, presents a reduction in participants autonomous behaviour and an
increase in amotivation. This is because individuals are becoming so invested
in competing with one another to record the best data that if they don’t reach
their daily step count or make it on the Fitbit leader board that they feel
less motivated and more incompetent. The reduction in autonomous behaviours may
be caused by the inability to relate to previous
experience on how to formulate the correct habitual demand
during exercise. This is because they have eliminated their innate involuntary response
by delegating the responsibility and knowledge to an external piece of
technology.
In conclusion, technology is becoming a large determinant
of the way we behave, and we are beginning to quantify our bodies because of
the gadgets we own. We need to begin listening to what our bodies really need
again and learning from experience, rather than depending on a record of
numbers on our watches and phones.
