DANCING WITH DATA
I LOOK DOWN ON MY SMARTWATCH in utter disbelief. I’ve run six lots of five-and-¾-minute kilometres – no breaks – and I’ve been at it for more than half an hour, so my heart pounds away at 160 beats a minute. I am exhausted. And yet, my smartwatch insists I have more to do. Its red “movement” ring, which shows me how many kilojoules I’ve burned in motion today, as well as how many I have left to go, wraps barely halfway around its axis. I don’t really want to believe it, but of course it knows better than I do.
For the 300 years we’ve carried pocket watches and worn wristwatches, they’ve offered up information. My smartwatch descends directly from that tradition in its outward design, but its philosophy and operation represent nearly its perfect inversion. My smartwatch exists not to offer information – but to greedily suck it up.
I treasure my greedy smartwatch; the first one I owned wasn’t greedy enough, wearing out in less than two years because it couldn’t keep up with everything I needed it to do – steps taken, runs tracked, laps swum, kilojoules burned. It fell apart: first mechanically, then electronically, then, finally, rebooting at inopportune moments. This upgrade handles everything I can throw at it, yet only shares a thoroughly edited version of what it knows.
Today our lives spin and twirl through devices driven by data; whether on wrists or desks, in pockets and pocketbooks, or – well beyond our immediate perceptions – somewhere out in an ill-defined “cloud” of computers far out of view. All of our data, collected, collated and edited, runs through that cloud: some in tight, fast loops, others extending into longer, broader loops encompassing hundreds of millions of bytes. We live within these loops: held by them, detected, measured and directed, all while dipping into them to see to our own needs. In my case, as I look at my smartwatch I’m looking through the display for another sort of reading, of something intangible yet fundamental: health.
Three years ago I felt overweight, out of shape and leaning into my genetic disposition to hypertension. I knew I needed to change; when at last I wanted to
