Doing nothing does something: Embodiment and data in the COVID-19 pandemic

Introduction: The new normal

There is a large sign on one of my city streets that flashes: WASH YOUR HANDS AND STAY INFORMED. To stay informed, I need to ensure my body and my data are perfectly aligned. I have done well so far. I stream daily updates of my Province of Alberta, my neighbouring Province of British Columbia, and Canada’s most populated Province of Ontario, as well as the Federal Updates by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, delivered outside his home in which he is currently practising self-isolation. That is four hours of streaming updates, aside from my Twitter and Reddit feeds that admonish and praise handlings and mishandlings of the pandemic, as well as my own research which currently consists of hours of reading non-peer reviewed publications in a swath of established medical and data-driven fields, let alone the social media posts by contemporary media philosophers and theorists, which Google Scholar tracks for its own recommendations of articles on pandemics and events involving communicable diseases. Yet all this research comes down to following a rule: stay home, face boredom. And wash your hands.

I hold no expertise on pandemics. But my body, my community, and my world are significantly and likely permanently altered by the Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). How do we frame COVID-19 as a data event? And what are the implications these data turns have about the body and embodiment in the age of social distancing? For those of us who presume we are not (yet) infected, one of the most challenging things to accept about the new normal is the fact that we do not know if our own bodies carry, and as a consequence, transmit the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Without sufficient testing, we cannot know if we are carrying a virus that has an extended asymptomatic period, and whether we might be harming others around us. With so little known about the virus, what it means to be a carrier depends very much on the data – which presently shows a long wait from asymptomatic carrying, to mild displays of flu-like symptoms, to eventual hospitalization and a critical point where the immune system exhausts the respiratory system, making people with pre-existing respiratory conditions especially vulnerable to the disease. But, knowing whether one is a carrier or not, waiting in isolation as Twitter-threads of exhausted medical professionals lose count of bodies in emergency rooms, is the cause of preparatory measures that are making some governments prepare to ‘flatten the curve’. The aim is to make a population embody a possible outcome, to curb the spike. Governments are encouraging citizens to do nothing in order to guarantee that nothing is the outcome, and to get used to doing nothing for a very, very long time.

What does it mean to have and to be a body in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic? Part of it has to do with being entirely exhausted by the range of data-driven possibilities and outcomes that we are currently anticipating. We are in the midst of an event, looking for certainty, but we are given an incomplete, heart-rending, and ongoing data-driven estimation of who will die and how many there may be. Two aspects are particularly exhausting: What do the data say when they change on a continual basis? And what do we do with our bodies as a result of the data shifts? The short answer, and the most provisional one to prevent the worst possible outcomes, has been to self-isolate, to socially distance, and, as a final resolution, to quarantine. The goal, the logos, of the COVID-19 pandemic is to isolate and prevent, to break the chain of contact. This makes the COVID-19 pandemic an existential threat to our mobile culture of transnational flows.

So where are we when we are self-isolating? We are all alone, with our data, whilst our data is being unleashed in a global public health movement to contain the spread. The implications for both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research programmes are enormous; disciplines may have to undergo their routine self-reinventions, and interdisciplinary projects will converge on objects and topics of immediate interest: facemasks, ventilators, public health and the vulnerable. Similarly, this unprecedented event will inform new perspectives and theories of the body and community. I argue here that social distancing and its variants (including self-isolation and quarantine) are the conceptual heuristics through which a new theory of embodiment will emerge, a dynamic one wherein the body and the socius are redefined, and where we are revisited by a reciprocal and community-based definition of data. In quarantine, we begin again.

To speak to the central object in this current development, I return to the body. In the pages of this journal, Ruppert et al. (2017) have asked (under what now seem very distant circumstances): ‘How is data part of the making and shaping of bodies and the body a site of data politics?’ (p. 6).The body is a site of data politics, they say, insofar as the body is at the crossroads of previously incompatible identities: producer and consumer; evaluator and evaluated; an entity in the process of consuming that also provides data about consumption, through consumption, so as to produce more consumption. Lupton (2016) envisages data in terms of a ‘companion-species,’ through which bodies make sense of themselves as endlessly ingesting and emitting data.¹ The body, then, is the exchange rate for data, revealing itself as a site of multiplicity. Elsewhere, Lupton (2017, 2018) refers to wearables and the sensory experiences of responding and making sense of personal data as an accumulation of ‘data sense’. These authors, along with many others, talk about a reciprocal relationship within the body – in that bodies sense, so that perceiving subjects perceive themselves and their social relations through a prism of data assemblages, which then return multiple senses of the self. Mobile media frame how a body engages with place, but also how place becomes extractable data for tracking and the analysis of global flow (Wilken and Goggin, 2015). As mobile media theorists note, we have always framed our place in the parameter of mobile media (from walking stick (Farman, 2018), to paperback (Saker and Frith, 2018), to Smartphone (Frith, 2015)). The de-domestication of media has been an ongoing project of global data flows; so much that its re-domestication is unfamiliar and strange. The convergence of media into a single device speaks to the freedom of contemporary digital subjects to embody places in wholly individualist ways that stream onto platforms intended to flatter the uploader (Trottier, 2012).

What we do with our bodies has a direct bearing on the types of data that are returned to the subject (Ball et al., 2016). The subject is thus not directly entwined with the world, but rather, is first entwined with the data that are entwined in economies of flow with the world (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). These questions have been posed under relatively ‘normal’ conditions. But the biggest question that the current situation poses to us is this: What do we do with our bodies? We are not being asked to just consider this: How do we keep our bodies clean and healthy? We are being encouraged to ponder the social dimensions of our body: Who and what are we allowed to touch? Everything the body does now comes into question: coughing, sneezing, wheezing, smelling, breathing, sounding (Greenhalgh et al., 2020: 2).

Conceptually, embodiment is a relevant phenomenological approach here, related closely to the writing of Merleau-Ponty (1962), articulated most simply and directly with this seemingly contradictory expression: to have and to be a body. However, in the context of mediation (either through media objects like digital devices or Big Data networks), embodiment becomes more complex because of the multi-temporal and multi-spatial intricacies of mediation that determine the situations of having and being a body. But what about this particular media event? Under the new normal of COVID-19, we cannot say in all certainty that we have bodies in the way we usually mean, because all bodies everywhere are increasingly subject to the state orders of social distancing and unprecedented data surveillance – without which medical researchers on the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team suggest that COVID-19 ‘would have resulted in 7.0 billion infections and 40 million deaths globally this year.’ Thus, under such conditions, neither can we say we can be a body because to be a body, as Merleau-Ponty (1968) writes, is to be in one’s world; our freedom, from an embodied phenomenological perspective, relies upon a reciprocity between what the world offers and what we give the world, which is what he calls an intercorporeity. The current situation is simple: we want the information to know what to do with our bodies, so that we might give back to a world that which it demands of us. Without knowing how to give back, we are simply the receivers of data. And the difficulty lives in perceiving that doing nothing is actually doing something. Being bored is being-with. Prolonging isolation is protecting the vulnerable, including medical professionals and essential services staff.

COVID-19 thus presents us with a unique challenge and an opportunity to redefine embodiment, redefine what it means to have a body and to be a body. We are prone to information overload, as our bodies do not know this particular strain en masse. This is usually the type of thing that happens to bodies that are deemed in need of isolation by the state, isn’t it? Those with pre-existing conditions and the elderly are especially vulnerable; those with immunosuppressive agents must strengthen their immune systems. We do not have the carrying capacity to support the number of ill, so social distancing may be for months or years. It’s possible that we can transmit the virus whilst asymptomatic. Media say to stay home if you are sick, stay home if you are well, teleconference instead of meeting, do not travel, do not commute do not shake hands do not touch your face stay inside find hobbies #flattenthecurveprotectvulnerablewashhandssinghappybirthdaytwic edontdrinkbleach … I think I’m going to tile my kitchen walls now …

Obviously, an exhausting amount of data is presenting and emerging, and we are in the midst of an event where all data are provisional.

Below I outline the difficulties in continuing with previously used terminologies that seek to make sense of the body in the age of datafication, especially the data double. In response to this, I propose that under the conditions of social distancing, digital subjects face the isolation of a data shimmer; when exhausted, this produces a boredom that reactivates the embodied sense of, and etymologically faithful rendition of, data: to be given and to give.

The data double exhausted

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the challenges of theorizing embodiment in the data turn have been related to the spectre of the data double. The data double is a concept that arose in the past couple of decades in the context of surveillance and biopolitics. It is related to the idea that data-generating devices and databases produce unfolding aggregates of our personalities, tastes and senses. These ‘doubles,’ mutable as they are, return to us in the form of partially recognizable versions of ourselves. The most literal example of a data double would be an avatar, or a YouTube recommendation, or even broader composites that contribute to the content of television shows based on audience tastes determined from aggregated viewing habits (Netflix’s first series, House of Cards, it is well-known to data scholars, was developed based on viewer preferences and its anticipated profits predetermined using algorithms for taste (Bellanova and Fuster, 2018)). Data doubles are born of sense, not only in the sense of our tastes, but in terms of our sensory experiences. Stucke and Ezrachi (2018), for example, indicate that Amazon’s Alexa introduced a new type of network traffic by analysing the voice service traffic. The textbook, Fashion Management, informs tomorrow’s marketing leaders that device such as Alexa

enable the building of an experience for the individual and, with a rising momentum, for conversational commerce, rooted in machine learning and natural language processing … These “always-on” listening devices have helped to create a sense of familiarity with the technology that allows for other applications to be created. (Varley et al., 2019: 310)

The current difficulties of theorizing embodiment in the COVID-19 pandemic rectify the problematics of the data double.

Social distancing and quarantine measures are normal public health procedures that have been implemented in previous pandemics, such as the Black Death, the 1918 influenza and the 2003 SARS pandemics (see Tognotti, 2013). But every pandemic introduces new factors and new measures; they are events with indeterminate outcomes (Rapp, 2012). Currently, the pandemic meets the body whilst the body is entwined with its data double. Where once the data double awaited in the shadows of our cognitive perception, it presently entices us within the new streams and flows and aggregations of our studies and living rooms, as we seek connectivity in the off-hours of our typical working window, but the on-hours of our global connectivity. The situation is quite different now. The off-hours are the on-hours as we sit and wait in self-isolation and social distancing, witness a barrage of social media advice on how to unplug and rediscover our connectivity with others – to go, as Moore(2020) suggested in an opinion piece in The Guardian, from mindfulness to mindlessness. We are looking at the long haul in our social distancing, at least long enough to come up with a vaccination against COVID-19 (12 to18 months; see Anderson et al., 2020). And, now, anyone who was critical of the social isolationism of our data turn (including social media platforms) has come to rely on it greatly, as our universities turn to online distance education (Longjun et al., 2020), our workout classes livestream on Instagram (Rundle et al., 2020), our late night shows are hosted without TV audiences from within living rooms (Glasner, 2020), and so on. We are at once more intimate with those we are usually distant from (celebrities) and less intimate with those in our physical communities; community, indeed, has been altered for the time being at least, with the pandemic appendage of community-spread (see Dietz and Black, 2012).

The data double now physiologically disrupts our daily routines in order to help stop the spread. A team of researchers in Seattle have designed the Immutouch, a wearable that vibrates an alarm when its wearer reaches to touch their own face (immutouch.com). A research team at Lovely Professional University has designed a wearable, the Kawach (Hindi for ‘Armour’), that sounds an alarm when its wearer comes within one meter of another Kawach wearer, and has a 30-minute routine reminder to the wearer to wash their hands (Ghosh, 2020). Technological innovations in the Internet-of-Things include Bluetooth body-temperature monitoring devices for hospital patients (Xi and Vivalnk Inc, 2020). Online consumer magazines praise such apps as Cardiogram for helping a user/wearer ‘become more aware of how their body is responding to symptoms of the flu or other illnesses including COVID-19’ (Peterson, 2020). Wearables can now claim that they can save lives in the long term, by enjoining us on fitness programmes and monitoring our heart levels, but also by ushering us through a pandemic. Theorizing embodiment in the COVID-19 pandemic is unique in that it does not involve a schism between perception and sensation, as is the case with the data double; instead, embodied perception takes hold of its world in toto through the data double. Where perception meets sensation is precisely in that arena that we have otherwise considered affective and full of possibilities. The shift is away from object-centred approaches, towards one that is more place-based, atmospheric, relational, and embodied – that is, sense-based. But sense in the COVID-19 pandemic has exhausted embodiment to the point that we are completely and entirely aware of the affective processes of the body; the algorithmic predications of the future are internalized to the point we monitor our breath and our touch, as we enter into a new shimmering effect of the body. It is not an abstraction to think that we affect and are affected by one another, in terms of how we move and live in closeness with others.

The data double concept is suitable for a capitalist-driven discourse, but is it suitable to the current global shift in attention? For instance, is it possible that we have shifted econocentric focus to a new public health imperative, if even for a little while? Kickbusch et al. (2020) write in the British Medical Journal that ‘financial rules that were considered sacrosanct are being bent with startling speed and force’, as ‘[l]eaders of public health institutions, virologists, and modellers have rarely been so visible and held so much responsibility’ (p. 1). To enforce quarantine, governments around the world have had to implement measures that very much challenge our previously held notions of data rights and data politics. Realistically, we cannot yet know the political and social consequences of these measures. Around the world, governments have implemented cellphone data tracking, to follow, in real time, the movements of populations, thereby suppressing any concern for personal data privacy in light of the public health concern (Hyunghoon et al., 2020). Phone-tracking was so effective in Taiwan, for instance, that they curbed a spike in their cases (Wang et al., 2020). Real-time data, such as the well-known Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 real-time data map, displays the body’s belonging in a global population (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html). HealthMap out of Boston Children’s Hospital is used on personal devices (Boulos and Geraghty, 2020); similarly, using GIS can locate outbreaks near the user. China’s ‘Close Contact Detector,’ meanwhile, tracks the recent locations of a user’s phone and correlates it with the users of other phones to determine whether one user has been in the same room or at least proximate to a confirmed or even suspected case (Boulos and Geraghty, 2020). These surveillance strategies highlight that the simple techniques of social distancing, social isolation and quarantine appear to be most challenging. It comes down to following a simple rule: stay home.

Staying home reveals an aspect of materiality that is important not to overlook: data is not necessarily digital but also material and situated, and thus real kinesthetic movement creates data. Data assembles through algorithms to anticipate experience; data can relate to the movements of the body and computational theory determines what those next moves may be. Beer (2018) observes that ‘a powerful new assemblage of human and non-human actors now perform as data intermediaries within this apparently overwhelming accumulation of data’ (p. 16). Perhaps, if we knew what the market value of our data was, we would be more protective of our data doubles. Today, we can see how valuable our data doubles are to tracking and monitoring populations, so much so that medical experts tout our data as a contributing factor to overcoming the pandemic (Wang et al., 2020). And this may be why data have drawn so much interest from cultural theorists of health, subjects who see themselves as their own double in the data they produce. That the data double has been theorized in health, surveillance, gaming, and other disciplines and fields, speaks to the plateau on which the data double moves. However, in the COVID-19 pandemic, the data double does not move. It is at once exhausted and bored.

The emergence of the data shimmer

The data double has been coupled to a more conventional, non-spectacular set of concerns. Consider some of the ways that our bodies’ experiences have been compelled, in the case of the data double, to be continuously measured beyond their own boundaries. Examples here include measuring our screen time, our steps, heart beats, fingerprints, app usage, and so on. Indeed, the body inside and out is a potential for computational mediation; Pederson and Iliadis (2020) argue, for instance, that the notion of wearables has in recent years expanded to include those media that are implanted, embedded, and ingested into the body as well. This data, we have come to understand, is then re-presented to the perceiver with various consequences that inform choices in body-projects (how many more minutes to add to our fitness routines, breath breaks, etc.; see Sanders, 2017). Or we can consider the new technological advances that measure the movements of employees, such as Dayforce, which measure app and keyboard usages to calculate paycheques that reflect the precise amount of work an employee has completed (ceridian.com).

How are we making sense of data in and of the body within the COVID-19 pandemic? This is a time marked by the uncertainty of bodies and borderlines. Where the body ends and the data double begins had some certainty to it before, even if it was on the margins of the body, vibrating on the periphery of sense. Now with the data double repurposed by means of its overexposure in the home environment, as well as its exploitation in the public health imperative, embodiment enters a new uncertain relationship with data. The term for this zone of uncertainty is what I call a data shimmer. The idea of a shimmer is drawn from affect theory, in particular Seigworth and Gregg’s (2010) ‘Inventory of Shimmers’, which accounts for the ‘stretching of process underway’ in the uncertainties of transition between binary oppositions. The current binary opposition, where doing nothing at home does something for the public good, and where much of this nothing/something binary is mediated by overflows of data, embodiment is marked by uncertain outcomes of a public health model that promises to ‘flatten the curve’.

Whereas the data double concept implies that the sensing body is fed-forward into the perceiving body in a feedback loop, quarantine demarcates a place where the two merge on the terrain of the sensing body. That is, the body occupies a place, in isolation, in total uncertainty: Will chloroquine diminish the effects of the virus on the lungs? Should I stay home even though I’m asymptomatic? Will I have enough toilet paper? Would mass testing expedite the process? Am I in the next epicentre? Could my friend have been a super-carrier? A shimmering effect lies between what is sensed and what is perceived. Where once we relied on models, we now have ‘forecasts’ (Castle et al., 2020). Where once the experts had answers, now they have speculation. Where journals were once peer-reviewed, some are becoming more lenient in their acceptance rates (Thomasy, 2020). It is, without a doubt, wavering data. No matter how much the data change, how many new normals emerge, the uncertainty remains the same, where embodiment and data flicker across transitory boundaries, unstable and not fully knowable. Perhaps we are entering a space that is more like a labyrinth that twists and turns with multiple avenues forward. This is what provisional knowledge is like. Have we entered a data shimmer? There is no answer to this question, either.

But the situation has changed radically in the shadow of COVID-19. Instead of tracking for multiple purposes, tracking occurs to meet one public health-centred purpose: to monitor the rate of change in a community (Bonadio and Baldini, 2020). Because this is a public health emergency, cellphone data is considered fair game for mass tracking since it is not for marketing goods. Further, one’s own isolated body has direct implications for the immediate and future experiences of all other bodies. In this new world, one body is not one body. Not the one and the many, but the one is the many. The more isolated it is, the more it contributes to the common good.

The reorientation to measurement is a kind of new phenomenology, previously alien to theorizations of the data double. Strangeness and indeterminacy call for more data, but because data is provisional, imagination and speculation are inevitable at a time that is not ‘business as usual’. Blackman (2019) points towards the efficacy of an alien phenomenology to accomplish such a reorientation.³ Under the data turn, she argues that embodiment has become something measurable, quantitative. But she writes on how movement of the body also creates trails of a ‘haunting’ in the datalogical turn:

These trails are difficult to account for in terms of graphs, data visualizations, index cards, overviews of the data sample, taxonomies of research materials, categorizations of methodological protocols, or as an account of the dispersion of texts as they relate to each other in an archive delimited by particular conditions of possibility and existence. The method is perhaps closest to an example of embodied hauntology, where the data is shaped and reshaped by my own actions. I have often experienced this reshaping and re-moving as akin to a form of daydreaming or reverie. (p. 19)

This is how the data turn could suggest we enter into a new affective and alien-like relationship with a machine that should be otherwise familiar. As mentioned previously, apps are under development that will vibrate if we touch our face, and telehealth data is connecting the vibrating living body with international databases. These apps and the device are bonded to experience, whilst also creating an opening to a new (im)mobility of restraint, in that the less we do, the better off we will be. Even more, the media or device that improved your health will now save everybody. Maybe this data shimmer should compel us to explore our boredom and our waiting. Consider so-called ‘useless apps,’ such as Nothing!, an app which is tasked with the purpose of allowing the user to do nothing – it has no screen, no icon, no function. Its purpose, instead, is to facilitate a break from smartphones altogether, without the option to close the app except at the dock, whenever the user ‘feel[s] … overwhelmed by [the] digital world’ (www.simpalm.com). The appeal of such an app for a media theorist is through how it draws attention to the medium (the smartphone) by disrupting the smartphone, whereby the content of the app (i.e., nothing) is inseparable from the concrete, physical act of framing every moment with a smartphone in hand. That is the very irony of the data shimmer: if we do it right, nothing will happen, and this is the greatest probability we have of beating the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Doing nothing so that nothing happens. But this example only gets us to a certain extent.

To follow a trail such as this is to follow the advice of Blackman (2019). She concedes that the sociology of the sciences should go towards the disruptive, the failures, the weird and the queer – the media parallel being those apps that interrupt the flow of formality and disrupt the so-called posthumanist merging of the human and the technological (i.e., Braidotti, 2019). Those kinds of disruptions occupy the centre of this experience, of being isolated and quarantined. The sociology of science has moved towards the more ecologically mindful practices of care (i.e., Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). But, to revisit the commentary from The Guardian (Moore, 2020), why not mindlessness? What good is learning more about social distancing, when the simple instruction is to stay home, to recharge with a pet project. Regarding orienting to weird things, Blackman would agree about the appropriateness of activating apps in a seemingly experimental manner:

So as well as the importance of the experimental apparatus—that is the devices—in actualizing what might be possible, the subjectivity or transsubjectivity of the experimental subject, and how to think this are also an important part of the success or efficacy of inventing or constructing particular experimental scenes. (p. 75)

In this new context, we must begin again with sensation and revisit the meaning of data from a global communal approach – that as much as data means something given to us, it also means something we give. This notion of giving back reflects on Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) insights on embodiment; not so much the strictly phenomenological being in the world, but his later concept, the field of being (1968). That is, whilst being in the world refers to the state of a phenomenological reflection, a useful methodology no doubt in times of alien-like orientations, the field of being refers to the dynamic transition between common-sense perception and phenomenological interrogation. The field of being captures the intertwining, chiasm-like materiality that lines the contours of the body with its extensional relations. In The Visible and the Invisible he writes:

If we reconstitute the way in which our experiences, according to their ownmost meaning, depend on one another, and if, in order to better lay bare the essential relations of dependency, we try to break them apart in our thought, we come to realize that all that for us is called thought requires that distance from oneself, that initial openness which a field of vision and a field of future and of past are for us. …In any case, since we are here only trying to take a first look at our natural certitudes, there is no doubt that, in what concerns the mind and truth, they rest on the primary stratum of the sensible world and that our assurance of being in the truth is one with our assurance of being in the world. (1968: 12)

Doing nothing does something

We have the opportunity in the data shimmer to begin again with the other, older meaning of data, which has to do with the notion of a gift and a reciprocity. The Latin origin of data is something given, the past participle of dare, meaning ‘to give’ (see Rosenberg, 2013: 18). Certainly, however, researchers have argued that the current state of data and datafication are central to social organization, that data is as much a valuable resource to political and social capital as raw material resources (see, for example, Couldry and Yu, 2018; Livingstone, 2019; Markham, 2018; Mascheroni, 2018). The data double, now framed by the techniques required by a public health imperative, contributes to the common good, having less to do with highly prized bidding wars over the value of individual datasets. Although the data double has been described in various venues in various ways, it has been inherited relatively unaltered from Haggerty and Ericson (2000), who theorized the data double some time ago as ‘a new type of body, a form of becoming which transcends human corporeality and reduces flesh to pure information’ (p. 613). Indeed, the data double has become the ubiquitous mirror of embodiment and datafication; however, under the new rules of quarantine and self-isolation, the data double recedes as a new entity emerges. We just are not necessarily aware of the entity yet, because we are in the midst of an event that encompasses the off-kilter participation of everything. It is this unknowing that gives shape to the data shimmer.

Currently, projects are emerging around the world that contribute to the meaning of data faithful to the notion of ‘giving’. Safecast is a fascinating case of ‘Free and Open Source Hardware’ (FOSH), for instance. This is the collective of hackers, inventors and citizen scientists who successfully measured radiation levels using freeware design after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Given the global uncertainty about the information that the public are being given by various national governments – for example, that some nations are encouraging their citizens to wear masks and some are not – leads to a frustrating sense of losing control. It makes it hard to ‘give back to’ the data that we receive. FOSH is currently being offered by Safecast, such as plans for homemade masks and ventilators. Safecast acts as a resource site for reliable and safe information on COVID-19, relying on open datasets and providing details on how to build hardware. The group’s maxim is that ‘the more people join ongoing projects or launch their own and freely share their progress online, the faster and more effective our united global community will be. The time to join is now’ (Chagas et al., 2020: 9).

We currently face a shocking amount of changes to our mediascapes, digiscapes and datascapes, although many of these changes have been anticipated within the discourses of media philosophy and theory. Specifically, we need to make experiential sense of new mediation by incorporating new embodiments of that mediation, which will generate fresh material integrations between the body and the environment, between body and quarantine. Embodiment is at once supposed to synthesize the mechanical elements with human perceptual faculties, but in a way that does not fully make sense of either. Contemporary sense media, responsible as they are for gathering data about human experience and reframing that data back into that experience, circumvent human faculties and instead speak directly to senses, sensation and sensibility. This creates complex layers of simultaneity, of multiple ‘right here, right now’ moments.

Much of the necessity for reconceptualizing the body/environment relationship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the environment is increasingly connected in a complex shimmer with all other media objects. The proliferation of telehealth alone has transformed an industry previously reserved for physical proximity, so that internet-based platforms (such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, FaceTime) are now the site of connection for physical and mental health and addictions support groups, for exercise classes, for checkups and for remote consultations. Thus, we need a new philosophy that captures this process of turning towards the new interconnectivity of everything.

A new experience, an actuality, emerges in concert with a change in everything else as an event. Or, rather, the sum of all entities whose shift manifests in the COVID-19 pandemic is not unlike the event of the Anthropocene, the event of social media, of the new right, of new borders. But the COVID-19 pandemic event encompasses and consumes and rearranges these other events, so that they are the presuppositions in the articulation of this new event. This is not a paradigm shift; it is a shift in everything. Indeed, keeping up with the seismic shift is exhausting: our work is tracked, as are our faces and our performances, and we are evaluated through them. Embodiment – what it means to have and to be a body – appears impossible in the data turn. However, in this present time of the COVID-19 pandemic event when knowing that a body doing nothing does something, a question arises: is it possible to begin anew the relationship between data and embodiment?

Conclusion: Embodiment in the data shimmer

Undoubtedly, we currently have a greater need for connectivity and access to data and emerging forecasts and models to inform us about whether we have ‘flattened [or planked] the curve’ through our ‘doing nothing’. The broader national and international value of our connectivity is also becoming more obvious to us, at least in a context where we see what our data is actually worth to those who consider it a necessary and extractable resource. In particular, in a public health discourse, the data harvested by governments contributes to the safety and security of our communities. Indeed, our own survival may depend on it, and it may constitute our own modes of community or family involvement. It may be the means through which we watch our loved ones sicken and die, or count and anticipate those close to us who are at risk; it may be how we ponder those who cannot stay isolated, such as individuals living through mandatory cancer treatment, the homeless, and the victims of domestic and child abuse and assault.

Ultimately, perhaps it is the privilege of boredom that needs to be part of the dynamic, since we are accustomed to spending those moments of boredom checking in on the status of our data doubles. Under the condition of social distancing and quarantine, the data double loses its idealized veneer. Our lived embodied experience of time has changed so that the future’s horizon of indeterminacy is clouded by the spectre of never returning to what has been. The data double, once occupying the horizon of what happens next, confronts us right here, right now. Take one of the data double’s most ubiquitous manifestations: the selfie. The selfie is a data double insofar as it is an expressive performance of one’s impression-management as it is viewed by others online (see Çadırcı and Güngör, 2019); it is also manifestation of the data double of facial recognition technologies and biometrics, for unlocking phones or passing airport security. In the past few weeks, frontline health services workers have posted selfies of their exhausted and mask-imprinted faces at the ends of their long shifts tending to the ill – a stark reminder to everyone that staying home is doing something. These selfies perform an outward, community health discourse. The effect is not to capture the gaze of the viewer, to free the viewer’s self-image, but to see a reciprocal and opposing dynamic of forces between exhaustion (the health care workers) and boredom (the socially distanced). Quite apart from the data double’s qualitative monism, the data double here is qualitatively dualist, between the bored and the exhausted. To proceed further, to recover the dynamic from the deluge of data and the exhaustion of sense, we need to plunge into the fascinating world of boredom and the opposite dynamic of flow – to stop movement, to embody, to collect and to find the pause before movement. If exhaustion is the annihilation of the possible, boredom recovers the dynamic that makes possible the possible.⁴ Thus, to animate bodies, the recovery mission emerges through the exhaustion of the data double on the exhaust of sense. In our bored hours, we witness on screens the exhaustion that charges our boredom with a spirit of contribution.

The data double, as it has been previously theorized, is not necessarily compatible with the new economic realities and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is difficult to tell what concept will be more suitable until we gain some distance from the event. Unfortunately, this is an indeterminate amount of time, as far as we can tell at this moment. Until a vaccine is found, self-isolation – a long hibernation – seems to be the only action that can prevent further spread. It has been the intention in this article to theorize data and embodiment in the COVID-19 pandemic differently; or, at least, I aimed to suggest that the data double is a presupposition to a new data entity that is just now emerging, shimmering, in the periphery of self-isolation. Nonetheless, I do not claim that we have entered a new historical or social order even though it seems increasingly evident that we will not return to the old normal. The COVID-19 pandemic is being fought by the frontline of health care professionals and other essential services staff. These efforts are augmented by Big Data analytics and algorithmic predictions, that are being lived out in the private experiences of everyone in the world (currently, previously, or potentially) on orders to do nothing so that nothing happens.

This mandated behaviour requires digital subjects to face their own boredom as a political and public health tactic. Over the last several years the encroachment of datafication and algorithmic governance has had determining effects on the edification of the role of sense in experience and perception. In the current crisis, the fact that the data double is quantitatively pluralist, but qualitatively monist, means subjects can experience the data double in the same location, every day, in self-isolation; this ultimately exhausts the data double, because it requires data subjects to be occupied with other things before checking in on it. The only way to productively do nothing is for us to do something in our doing of nothing. This is now especially the case, with the data double serving as a utilitarian and exploitable tool for tracking the whereabouts of bodies and their potential level of contamination. Maybe now that the data double serves a utilitarian purpose – tracking the spread of a global disease – we can put to rest the fantasy of the data double that has sustained the digital subject: that the data double has disrupted our individuality, but in this current pandemic world has itself been interrupted, now serving a meaningful purpose, that of collectively contributing to the global common good of saving as many people as possible.

The theorization of embodiment through the data shimmer is not a proclamation for a new term as much as it is an attempt to capture the emergence of a new data entity, one that is more complex than the data double, but which subsumes the data double as its presupposition. In particular, when digital subjects meet their data doubles in their self-imposed isolation, the qualitative monism of the data double gets exhausted, compelling us to begin again. We are called to reinvent our relations with data and incorporate data into a new outward-bound, community-focused ethic of doing nothing as a way of doing something. If the crisis is ever over, this new data shimmer will have an effect on the self-perception of the digital subject. This is not to say the data double is done, but rather that the data double becomes the background, the presupposition, against which a new entity emerges. As the example of Safecast’s new imperative to provide FOSH demonstrates, the materiality of data comes with the imperative to empower digital subjects as digital citizens, converging on a commons in which public health is the central focus of a global community.

Such action is presupposed by the data double. One of Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) axioms, ‘that it [the lived object] presents itself to us from the start as the centre from which the data radiate’ could very well be captured by new conduit-mediated forms of sociality. For instance, the new social distancing might precondition a more intimate relationship with the hardware, which is gifted to us through open-sourced networks. Thus, the data double is not replaced, but rather consumed and exhausted by whatever emerges from within the current data shimmer. This shimmer is shaped by the uncertainty of data assemblages, currently unreliable given the variable numbers of a population that are tested, the density of urban spaces, the pre-existing economic superstructure that determines how hardware will be distributed, and the cultural practices of proximity or distance that community members and members of a nation already practice. We need more research to understand how data is absorbed into the body and into experience. The pre-COVID-19 world demonstrated a symbiotic fluidity between the digital subject and the data double – but this is now absorbed into a new, community-based reality of lived isolation and boredom that arises from the qualitative monism of data and embodiment in the datalogical turn.