I was recently learning how to use the popular vector-based drawing program, Sketch, through a course on Treehouse. I have to say, it’s a pretty good course.
But in it, we had to design a sample app—an activity tracker, that could capture the mundane details of your daily life.
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This seemingly harmless app struck me as this kind of odd [tech] freudian slip—a portrait of what we imagine tech to be. 1.
Our app imagines handsome, white 20-something, Johnny Appleseed, living a neat life in San Francisco, with razor like precision. He sleeps for 7 hours and 27 minutes. He consumes 150 grams of Granola. This causes him to gain 107 calories. He cycles 3.2 miles through the city, in 15 minutes and 24 seconds. He gets of his bicycle, and dutifully checks in at the cafe at 8:36am.
Documenting life in this kind of floating-point-precision strikes me as absurd. Does this make people more free and more happy? Is it even worth the effort?
When society first produces an abundance of something scarce, they tend to over-enjoy it. I think back on the 40’s and 50’s, when mass-produced consumer goods and mega-farm foods were all the rage. When things like fast food and highway culture were still new and glamorous, and their ill-effects still unknown.
Yes, these technologies were advances, but we over-embraced them. They had hidden costs.
Today, that new abundance is data. Data data everywhere—we’ve never before had this much data. It’s new and exciting and we have buzzwords like Big Data.
But I think part of the reason we’re consuming this data is because we can, not necessarily because we should. What do I mean by this?
Returning to our app, assuming you never had to manually enter anything (a generous assumption), you’d still have to open your app every day, to consume your streams of data.
Consuming all this data would be okay if we got something valuable in return. Aren’t we getting that? Productivity and life-hack apps all promise us valuable insights—they’re supposed to be empowering tools. But I would argue that an app like this, and indeed many others, can at best deliver us a kind of shallow reflection of our lives, only with more precision than we’re used to. Rather than processing it for us, our apps funnel us the junk data, and expect us to make sense of it.
But “what’s wrong with more data?,” you ask. “data is power.”
Nay, I say! Data is exhausting. This data is exhausting to look at (to speak nothing of entering it, or correcting it here and there). The minutes you spend using this app are exhausting minutes. And if those minutes add to your quality of life with insights, it is also likely that they detract from your quality of life, with in the form of mental exertion. The time and energy you have to spend on it calls into question the value of the app as a whole.
Real or imagined, apps like this would be truly useful if they could automatically collect and distill the data that composes your life—into a handful of useful insights. An isight could be something like: “you should exercise more on weeknights, when your calendar is free,” or “Your current diet might be high in trans fats, which can affect heart health.”
An app that that told us things like that might really have some value in improving our lives. But until we can get this kind of meaning our of our data, and out of apps, I’m not sure we should bother with them.
I don’t use Apple health, for example, because it looks so exhausting to even get into motion, and I’m not sure it would help me in any meaningful way. I’ve given up on productivity apps like 30/30, because they add work to situations—requiring manual entry of tasks and times. I’ve used apps that to track my energy and mood, but even making the small commitment to log a daily update has proven difficult, and not because of laziness—because it just isn’t worth all the effort.
I don’t think these apps are bad, I just think we can do better—and until we do, I’m not sure we should be using them. Just because we can consume junk data, doesn’t mean we should.
At the end of the day, our time and our effort is the most valuable commodity of all. Right now, Johnny Appleseed would probably be a happier human being if he stopped checking in at the orchard, and focused on planting the apple trees.
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