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An End-of-Decade Look at the Metrification of Everything
If what gets measured gets managed, how is our ‘data-driven’ society managing us?
This morning, as all mornings, I opened Twitter, Linkedin, and Medium. I know I’ve been in a writing slump on Medium because I only had nine notifications this morning. I probably haven’t been doing enough social media marketing either: only three notifications on Twitter. On LinkedIn I had eight notifications, but somehow none of them were actually related to me. Maybe LinkedIn is trying to tell me something. Duolingo is definitely trying to tell me something: I broke my language learning streak.
Last week, while traveling, I took five Lyfts and provided 25 stars. Some say I’m too generous, but unless something goes seriously wrong during the drive I give five-out-of-five. I’m not about to put someone’s livelihood at risk because I don’t like their music or because they’re not an effusive conversationalist. I also gave surveys to 15 students via Google Forms last week. Their average satisfaction with my class was evidently 3.9 / 4. I wonder if the students treat my survey the same way I treat Lyft drivers, but I’m grateful for the ego boost either way. I also wonder if Google learned as much about my students as I did: Maybe they’ll be served an ad for a competitor’s computer science class.
Feedback is a powerful determinant of human behavior. We respond to social pressure, blinking red lights, and new high scores. An old managerial adage claims that whatever gets measured gets managed. Of course, a zillion companies want you to prioritize their products and services over everything else. They will send you various measurements, multiple times per day, often encircled in an urgency-inducing red bubble, begging you to log back into their app. Most of us cannot help but be affected by this feedback, often without ever realizing it. As the renowned science fiction writer William Gibson observed, “first we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.”
Much has been said about the enormous data extraction operation that has been evolving online. Entire books, such as security expert Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, are filled with disturbing revelations of…
