Abstract
A few days ago, on my Twitter feed, I came across a striking photo. It was a picture of a football match between Barcelona and Liverpool (1 May 2019). Messi, the Argentinian star, had just taken a free-kick. The ball was about to go into the top-right corner of the goal, despite the magnificent flight of the Liverpool goalkeeper in the attempt to avoid it. The shots were beautiful, both Messi’s and the photographer’s. What struck me most, however, was what was going on in the stand behind the goal. There, the crowd divided into two groups: those who were photographing or videoing the moment, and those who were simply watching the game. While the latter revelled in anticipation of the goal, mouths semi-open and arms in the air, the former stood motionless, mobile phones held still, blank expressions on their faces, as if decoupled from the whole situation. The moment I realised it, Steffen Mau’s book on the Metric Society – which I was reading to write this review – immediately came to my mind. Together with the book, the photo pointed towards the impact of mediating devices and technologies on the way we live, and on the ways we experience life itself.
Indeed, Mau offers a comprehensive and detailed account of the contemporary exponential growth of digital datafication across the globe. He argues that such process gives rise to a ‘metric society’, that is, a society in which ‘data and indicator-based methods of evaluation and monitoring (…) are encouraging a wholesale quantification of the social sphere’ (p. 2). This has three major sociological consequences: (1) numbers invade and colonise the lifeworld and become the means through which we ascribe value and social status; (2) the quantitative recording and measurement of social phenomena prompts a (near) universalisation of competition, as winners and losers can more easily be identified; and (3) qualitative differences are now coded, whenever possible, as quantitative differences, to facilitate comparability and assessment. It is to this third consequence that the football photo mentioned above relates to, because it portrays the actual process of neglecting live engagement with an ongoing event in exchange for its recording and storage, potentially aimed at posterior use in a number of situations, including social media posts. These will constitute proof that the author was there, and should therefore gain extra points (that is, increased social status) for having had access to such a relevant sporting event. A question begging to be asked, of course, is: when sight is being lost of the inherent value of a given situation or phenomenon, how real is the danger that sight is also being lost of the inherent value of people themselves? Mau’s book, written in what I would describe as a realistically pessimistic tone, pushes us to ask vital questions such as this.
A degree of repetition in the arguments presented, while understandable given the inter-relatedness of the topics covered, might have been reduced if the author had chosen to put more of himself in the text, leading readers from point (condition) A to point (argument) B, rather than opting to address the same issues from a range of different entry points. This made me feel that more good than harm would result from the book being some 20 pages shorter.
This being said, Steffen Mau has done a great job in describing how the ‘cult of quantification’ operates, as well as some of its (potential and actual) consequences. The book is well grounded in a vast and relevant literature and covers an extensive array of topics, from academic rankings to actuarial justice, through to credit scores, travel reviews, professional assessment, and reputation building through social media, among others. In the process, it offers important insights and raises relevant questions, many of which have a clear Foucaultian inspiration. For instance, those which address the non-neutral, political constitution of rankings and those which focus on the increasing pervasiveness of the care of the self-techniques rendered possible by self-tracking technologies that enable micro-management at unprecedented levels. Also, a critical approach to the effects of ‘numerocracy’ runs throughout the book, as Mau recurrently highlights its consequences for the reproduction of social and power inequalities. Importantly, he articulates this process with the perceived lameness of ideological criticism and the need to engage with the ‘numerical semantics’ (p. 128) of the newly established nomination powers in order to challenge them.
Therefore, I believe this book will be valuable not only to researchers studying postmodern society, but also to the common citizen who likes to engage with the analysis of the world’s current issues. In this regard, Sharon Howe’s translation deserves a word of praise for making the text highly readable.