Relationship Tracking: Commodification of relationships and intimacy
The reading that intrigued me this week is âRelationship Tracking and the Technicity of Intimacyâ written by Alex Lambert. Through analysing the mobile phone application âPplKprâ, he explores how the growing market of self-tracking applications have evolved to include social relationship surveillance and the quantification of intimacy within social relationships. He claims that while users may see self-tracking applications as assistance in alleviating our labour of measuring and assessing their social relationships, the reality is rather the opposite: these relationship tracking applications only create more labour by putting users in a place where they are compulsively disposed to questioning and quantifying the quality of their social relationships. This is because intimacy itself is a multi-faceted and complex issue that resists quantification because of how it is fundamentally subjective and self-reflexive. Lambert concludes that intimacy is after all âan eternal mysteryâ, one that technologies have proven to be incapable of detecting and measuring. Additionally, he brings in the idea that where intimacy is concerned, techniques that technologies use to quantify an individual and their relationships will be influenced by calculated cultural norms and socio-political structures, which means that there will be inherently biased calculations in their algorithms. As these applications get commercialised and distributed to global markets, it would simply be unreasonable to assume that every user would view the concept of intimacy and regulate their social relationships the same way. Therefore, he posits that the relationship tracking technology simply perpetuates an obsessive, compulsive attitude towards the mystery of intimacy through encouraging people to engage in excessive evaluation and quantification of intimacy.
Firstly, I agree strongly with Lambertâs criticism on of relationship-tracking technologies. Personally, I view the growing market for self-tracking applications, especially relationship-tracking apps, as commodifying oneâs emotional health. By promoting people to track their emotions through monitored social interactions, I see this as a form of surveillance over oneâs personal life. Why should we provide such information, about whom we are meeting, where we are meeting, and how long we are meeting, to corporations who are collecting and analysing this data? We are allowing ourselves, our relationships to be commodified. By collecting our data through these apps, these corporations will be able to collect big data that they are able to capitalise upon (e.g. a lot of people have reported going to this shopping mall for a date, and happy emotions have been reported there, the corporation can then sell this information to advertisers who are targeting couples). This means that we are essentially creating labour as we engage in these relationship-tracking applications.
Additionally, I am of the opinion that technologies and algorithms are incapable of defining a âhealthyâ relationship. I am repulsed by the way PplKpr operates, especially their claim that the application is able to assist the user in curating a more intimate social sphere, improve their emotional health and intimacy and hence lead a healthier life. I find the most problematic their feature of âautomatically blocking and removing contacts who elicit negative moodsâ. Firstly, the algorithmâs understanding of intimacy and relationships are superficial. The application focuses on encouraging positive moods and people with positive moods, yet also encourage users to actively shun people who instigate a negative emotional response from the user. The application fails to consider how social relationships are not always smooth-sailing. The most important people in our lives: our families, significant others, close friends, and our relationships with them contain of a good balance between positive and negative emotions. While there may be periods of intensive negative emotions, the solution of âblocking and removingâ are the opposite of a useful feature in helping the user regulate their intimate relationships. The agency and choice to respond to these situations should solely lie in the user, instead of relying on technology to mediate our relationships. Why should we let technology dictate how we regulate intimacy in our relationships? Negative emotions are not always a bad influence on social relationships, they can have the potential to strengthen social relationships. Over-relying on the concept of technological solutionism where we use technology to dictate the management of intimacy proves to be problematic. After all, intimacy and social relationships are a self-reflexive issue, and we should not depend on technologies which only attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.
















