I’m a big fan of Warren Ellis’ MORNING, COMPUTER blog and ORBITAL OPERATIONS newsletter; mentioned in a recent installment of the latter was byHeart, a proposed app for the Apple Watch.
On the surface—and assuming it (A) comes into being, and (B) catches on—byHeart appears to another way to quantify, rate, and share/brag about one’s experiences rather than just experiencing them. I was thinking about this kind of thing when hiking on Sunday, when I realized I felt weirdly obligated to take a picture of a waterfall and put it on Instagram, crossposting to my increasingly moribund Twitter and Facebook pages as I did so. It’s a weird feeling, to feel like something doesn’t really “count” unless it’s documented or ranked or shared somehow, but that’s how that impulse felt. As much as I value seeing what certain other people are up to (and, to be fair, as much as I sometimes value documenting what I’m up to), I’ve been trying to ease back on it lately to see what, if any, difference it makes. I’ve been experimenting with a distraction-free iPhone, and so far, I generally like doing so, even though I still get a weird, almost unconscious desire to point my attention at Twitter whenever I have a down moment. Something like byHeart—where you’re cataloguing and ranking your responses to things without even being aware that you’re doing so—seems to go in directly the opposite direction.
Ellis added this note:
Here’s a fun idea. Remember Facebook’s experiment in emotional contagion? Deliberately setting some people’s Facebook timelines to show only sad things, to see what it did to them? Imagine an emotional-contagion experiment where they could access your heartrate off your smartwatch too.
I think about what it would be like to watch a movie with byHeart running on my wrist—looking down to gauge if its findings matched my feelings in realtime, and/or looking at the app as the credits roll and considering if the data conforms to my emotions about the film—and I feel a pang of technodread. I’m hardly a Luddite when it comes to computers or medicine or books or movies (or food, for that matter), but things like byHeart are weird, unexpected reminders that the manner in which we experience media might be unrecognizably different in 20, 30, 40 years. I’m both curious and skeptical about what it’ll be like.
Related, kind of:
If you’re interested in using Twitter less, weening yourself off of it probably won’t work. I have the fortune of being forgetful, so even when I used it regularly I would still have days where I totally forgot to look at it. And then I intentionally paused my usage for a week or two, and as a result I completely lost the impulse to use it. Now when I look at it I only feel anxious dread (even more so than before). And, most importantly: I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
Anyway, I have no need for a heart rate monitor to tell me how into a movie I was (or how dead I am inside!).