I play a lot of board games, and I always track my plays with an app called BG Stats, which keeps track of things like player count, win/loss ratios, point totals, role selection, days and dates, and other factors. None of this is necessary, but many people (including myself) elicit a sort of ordered pleasure from being able to go back through the log and see that I played x game x times this month and I won x of those games.
For this reason I am interested in what we might call the affective pleasure of statistics. The readings on data mostly addressed the ways in which data are naturalized, siphoned away from their creators, and harnessed for (often) nefarious ends. But what they failed to address is how many people derive a sense of order and meaning from their abstracted data. Have our very thoughts been colonized -- is this a form of false consciousness? -- or might we cultivate a new relationship toward personal, protected data?
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