{"id":5474,"date":"2015-01-26T08:58:02","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T15:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5474"},"modified":"2015-01-27T05:17:45","modified_gmt":"2015-01-27T12:17:45","slug":"jonathan-swifts-smartphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5474","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Swift’s smartphone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Evolution has engineered us for social interaction. Our bodies are instruments exquisitely\u00a0tuned for tracking and measuring\u00a0the auras of others. In quantifying ourselves, therefore, we also quantify those around us. This is the insight that underpins the brilliant new iPhone app pplkpr<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Connected to a sensor-equipped smart\u00a0wristband, pplkpr takes biometric readings of how interactions with your Facebook friends, in person or screen-mediated, affect your physical and emotional state. pplkpr tells you, in\u00a0hard, objective numbers, whether a friend makes you happy or sad, anxious or calm, aroused or enervated. It’s a flux capacitor for the soul.<\/p>\n

\"pplkpr\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What’s really cool\u00a0about the app is how it makes the biometric\u00a0data socially actionable. pplkpr doesn’t just give you “a breakdown of who’s affecting you most,” its developers say; it also “acts for you \u2014 inviting people to hang out, sending messages, or blocking or unfriending negative friends.” Bottom line<\/a>: “It will automatically manage your relationships, so you don’t have to.” The next step, clearly, will be to aggregate the data, so you’ll be able to tell at a glance whether a would-be\u00a0friend will add something meaningful to your life\u00a0or just bum you out.<\/p>\n

From its vowel-challenged name to its\u00a0clinically infantile interface, pplkpr is of course a work of satire. It was developed by a pair of artists, with backing not from Kickstarter but from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The wonderful thing about the app\u00a0is that it’s being taken seriously. The early reviews at the App Store are encouraging:<\/p>\n

\"review\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Among tech sites, the buzz is building.\u00a0Techcrunch<\/em> gives<\/a> the app a straightfaced review, seeing a lot of upside:<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t know how you feel about someone in your life? By pairing a heart rate monitor with the\u00a0pplkpr\u00a0iOS app, you could soon find out.\u00a0The app pairs up with any Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor\u00a0to track your physical response around certain people in your life. Biofeedback from those devices log\u00a0reactions such as joy, anger, sadness, and\u00a0then\u00a0uploads what it determines to be those emotional reactions\u00a0to the app. …<\/p>\n

The overall\u00a0promise is to help you spend more time with those who contribute to your well-being and avoid those who stress you out. It does this in a way that aims to excuse you from having to make that sometimes difficult decision yourself.\u00a0pplkpr\u00a0doesn\u2019t tell you if someone you meet has been blocked by others or if you are actually \u00a0the one stressing everyone else\u00a0out, but it does provide a nice excuse to get away from someone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And check out this glowing report<\/a> from Fox News.<\/p>\n

Even journalists who know it’s a joke can’t help but see genuine\u00a0potential in its workings.\u00a0Wired<\/em>‘s Liz Stinson didn’t even crack a smile in covering<\/a> the\u00a0app today:<\/p>\n

pplkpr lets you quantify the value of your relationships based on a few data streams. A heart rate wrist band measures the subtle changes in your heart rate, alerting you to spikes in stress or excitement. This biometric data is correlated with information you manually input about the people you\u2019re hanging out with. Based on patterns, algorithms will determine whether you should be spending more time with a certain person or if you should cut him\u00a0out altogether. …<\/p>\n

Framed as art, pplkpr is granted the buffer of being a provocation or even satire, but it\u2019s not outlandish to consider a reality where people will earnestly look to algorithms to make sense of how they feel. Implemented\u00a0responsibly, that\u00a0could be a positive thing \u2014 an objective set of eyes can help us see that a relationship is unhealthy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wouldn’t be surprised\u00a0at this point to\u00a0see Mark Zuckerberg buy pplkpr \u2014 for, say, $1.3 billion. It would\u00a0hardly be the first time that satire proved prophetic.<\/p>\n

This post is an installment in Rough Type\u2019s ongoing series \u201cThe Realtime Chronicles,\u201d which began\u00a0here<\/a>. A full listing of posts can be found\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evolution has engineered us for social interaction. Our bodies are instruments exquisitely\u00a0tuned for tracking and measuring\u00a0the auras of others. In quantifying ourselves, therefore, we also quantify those around us. This is the insight that underpins the brilliant new iPhone app pplkpr. Connected to a sensor-equipped smart\u00a0wristband, pplkpr takes biometric readings of how interactions with your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-realtime"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5474"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5495,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5474\/revisions\/5495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}