Life-stowing from a Digital Media Perspective

160 Pages·2017·3.8 MB·English

Life-stowing from a Digital Media

Perspective: Past, Present and Future

Alberto Frigo
SÖDERTÖRN DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS

Life-stowing from a Digital Media Perspective:
Past, Present and Future

Alberto Frigo
Subject: Media and Communication Studies
Research Area: Critical and Cultural Theory
School: Culture and Education
Södertörn University

Södertörns högskola
(Södertörn University)
The Library
SE-141 89 Huddinge

www.sh.se/publications

© Alberto Frigo

Cover image: Alberto Frigo

Cover layout: Jonathan Robson
Graphic form: Per Lindblom & Jonathan Robson

Printed by Elanders, Stockholm 2017

Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations 139
ISSN 1652–7399

ISBN 978-91-88663-00-9 (print)
ISBN 978-91-88663-01-6 (digital)
Abstract
While both public opinion and scholars around the world are currently pointing out
the danger of increasingly popular life-logging devices, this book articulates this
debate by distinguishing between automatic and manual life-logging approaches.
Since new definitions of life-logging have excluded the latter approach and have been
mainly focused on effortless life-logging technologies such as Google Glass and
Quantified Self applications in general, the second part of this thesis theoretically
frames life-stowing.
Through extensive etymological research, I have defined life-stowing as a manual
and effortful practice conducted by life-stowers, individuals who devote their life to
sampling reality in predefined frameworks. As part of this book, an historical over-
view introduces life-stowers and distinguishes between Apollonian and Dionysian
varieties of these practitioners. Lastly, in order to understand the future reception of
life-stowing, particularly in relation to digital media, I have disclosed my ongoing life-
stowing project to a small audience.
Keywords: life-stowing, tebahism, effortfull, life-logging, quantified self, self-
tracking, surveillance, sousveillance, archiving, syncretism, constructivist theory of
perception, database aesthetics.

Preface
And I understood that those sciences are very interesting and attractive, but that they
are exact and clear in inverse proportion to their applicability to the question of life: the
less this applicability to the question of life, the more exact and clear they are, while the
more this try to reply to the question of life, the more obscure and unattractive they
become.
Tolstoy 2005:23
I stow, therefore I am: since 2004, when I was 24 years old, I have been continuously
documenting 18 aspects of reality and I have devised 18 ways to elaborate them. As of
12 October 2016, for example, I have photographed 330,000 objects my right hand has
used, I have written down 14,300 dreams, I have video-recorded 20,880 public spaces
where I sat, I have made 9,930 drawings of my ideas, I have recomposed 6,720 songs I
have heard, I have portrayed 992 new acquaintances, I have picked 134 square meters
of trash from the sidewalk. I could go on boring the reader with such a list. My point
here, however, is that in the near future, lists of this kind might not be all that bizarre;
as technology progresses, ordinary people are more likely to hoard more of their
personal data; or better, let me put it this way: as technology progresses, technology is
more likely to hoard more and more personal data from common people.
Several books have in recent years focused on personal data stored via life-logging
devices and Quantified Self services (e.g. Rettberg 2014; Nafus, Nefs 2016; Lupton
2016). This book is my attempt to research a similar topic but from a different point of
view. In the first place, I write from the perspective of a practitioner who has anti-
cipated this phenomenon. Second and most importantly, I write from the vantage
point of a practitioner who has been documenting his life manually, without the
assistance of automated sensors or algorithms, and therefore doing the work of the
technology. Thirdly, I write from the perspective of a practitioner who has crafted his
practice based on his design of an architecture in which to contain 36 years of the
collected data. Given these three perspective, in this book I call my manual practice
“life-stowing” as opposed to technologically driven storing and in relation to older
historical traditions.
While written within Media and Communication Studies, the rich content of this
book is also a form of stowing the results of many years of thinking and exposing
myself through my demanding media practice. Methodologically as well, as in my life-
stowing project, this book makes use of several methods to draw a comprehensive
trajectory from what I believe to be the historical origins to the present and future
scenarios of life-stowing media. In this respect, it proposes an alternative perspective
to the field of Media and Communication that takes into account the empirical
knowledge that constant exposure to a media practice inevitably brings. In keeping
with this line of thinking it should be viewed as a form of autoethnography.
Sammanfattning
Den samtida samhälls- och forskningsdebatt, där de allt mer populära teknologierna
för life-logging ofta framställs som farliga, vidgas och utvecklas i denna bok genom
ett särskiljande av automatiska och manuella tekniker för life-loggning. Eftersom nya
definitioner av life-loggning i stor utsträckning har exkluderat manuella tekniker och
fokuserat på egenmätning som inte kräver så mycket av användaren, såsom Google
Glass, består avhandlingens andra del av ett teoretisk utforskande av begreppet life-
stowing.
Genom omfattande etymologisk forskning definieras life-stowing i avhandlingen
som en manuell och ansträngande praktik utförd av life-stowers, personer som vigt
sina liv åt att samla och spara bitar av verkligenheten enligt fördefinierade ramar. I
den historiska översikten introduceras två typer av life-stowers, den Apollonianska
och den Dionysiska. Slutligen, för att förstå det framtida mottagandet av life-stowing
i relation till digitala medier, avslöjas i avhandlingen författarens egna life stowing-
projekt för en mindre publik.