Continuous connection converts lived activity into machine-readable data and a branded, conditional ‘truth’.

Evidence

Potential inputs that are not machine readable become irrelevant, since the goal is always to increase N, the aggregate of what can be counted as data. Meanwhile, data subjects are generating material for machine reading all the time. We are constantly encouraged to act in ways that stimulate further counting, gain us more followers, and achieve better analytics. … This “Truth” is not the truth about society at which nineteenth-century statisticians were aiming—it is a branded, tethered, contract-specific, only conditionally sharable, personally targeted truth that is both the reward and price of continuous connection. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 401

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘branded, tethered, conditionally shareable truth’ echoes the reader’s work on spectacle and enforced attention as reward-and-price structures. — connects to: Lifestreaming is distinguished from personal diaries by networked public readability — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 545; Platforms reconfigure human life to continuously produce extractable data streams. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 45; Refashioning humans as data-open inforgs makes them continuously available for external modulation. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 479 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Daily life is now comprehensively recorded into a continuous electronic text #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 574
• The cloud operates as an episteme that pre-organizes social life for datafication #corroborates (0.82) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 173
• Everyday consumer objects are being redesigned as behavioral data sources #exemplifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 748
• Continuous surveillance archives make every life retrospectively traceable across space and time. #expands (0.78)
• Activity-based intelligence replaces identity and files of data become death warrants #expands (0.75)