The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social

by Steffen Mau

In today's world, numbers are in the ascendancy. Societies dominated by star ratings, scores, likes and lists are rapidly emerging, as data are collected on virtually every aspect of our lives. From annual university rankings, ratings agencies and fitness tracking technologies to our credit score and health status, everything and everybody is measured and evaluated.

In this important new book, Steffen Mau offers a critical analysis of this increasingly pervasive phenomenon. While the original intention behind the drive to quantify may have been to build trust and transparency, Mau shows how metrics have in fact become a form of social conditioning. The ubiquitous language of ranking and scoring has changed profoundly our perception of value and status. What is more, through quantification, our capacity for competition and comparison has expanded significantly - we can now measure ourselves against others in practically every area. The rise of quantification has created and strengthened social hierarchies, transforming qualitative differences into quantitative inequalities that play a decisive role in shaping the life chances of individuals.

This timely analysis of the pernicious impact of quantification will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, as well as anyone concerned by the cult of numbers and its impact on our lives and societies today.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Politics, Science, Economics, Technology

200 pages, Hardcover

First published June 13, 2017

About the author

Steffen Mau is a German sociologist and Professor at the institute of social sciences at Humboldt University Berlin.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

In der Zeitschrift bergundsteigen Nr. 102 aus dem Frühjahr 2018 habe ich interessante Zitate aus diesem Buch gefunden. Jetzt habe ich sozusagen direkt aus der Quelle gelesen und bin auf beunruhigte Weise beeindruckt. Stefan Mau schildert, wissenschaftlich abgesichert, von der Wirkmacht der Daten die gesammelt werden, von den Algorithmen die diese Daten klassifizieren und den Auswirkungen die diese daraus folgenden Rankings für jeden einzelnen von uns haben. "Ob Bildung, Gesundheit oder Konsum: Über so ziemlich jeden Aspekt werden inzwischen Daten gesammelt. Schritt für Schritt entsteht so eine Gesellschaft der Sternchen, Scores, Likes und Listen, in der alles und jeder ständig vermessen und bewertet wird. Die Gesellschaft des metrischen Wir erzieht uns zu Numerokraten, die immerzu die Zahlen im Blick haben. Die Quantifizierung des Sozialen hat somit das Potenzial, ein neues Regime der Ungleichheit hervorzubringen, in dem wir immerfort bewertet sowie mit anderen verglichen werden und in dem wir uns fortwährend darum bemühen müssen, mit guten Zahlen zu glänzen." (Klappentext) Die Ironie an dieser Geschichte ist ja, dass auch diese Plattform mit Rankings und Scores arbeitet. Es gibt Lesechallenges, es werden die gelesenen Seiten aufgezeigt. Es werden Vergleiche mit den Vorjahren angestellt und Sternchen für Bücher vergeben. Rezensionen können geliket werden und wir alle sind Bewerter und Bewertete zugleich. Ein fast minutiöses Abbild der in diesem Buch geschilderten digitalen Welt - welche immer realere Auswirkungen auf unser Leben hat.

[Nixie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice bibliography, but the book feels more like a collection of references and less like an analysis or a narrative. For people who already know that the lauded algorithms are only as fair as their creators (and/or training data) and reducing human performance to numbers leads to gaming those numbers this book won't uncover much new ground. For people who are not familiar with these topics, I think the book does not explain almost anything in enough detail.

There are some snappy quotes to be snitched from it though.

[Colin Ellard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a topic that interests me greatly and I found many passages I had to bookmark and underline. The issues Mau raises in this book are incredibly important and many are frightening. In places the writing is a little dry and I suspect this will make this book have narrower appeal than it deserves. Too bad as the quantification of the social is having enormous impact on all of us. Though it might now be impossible to avoid participating it's even worse to do so unwittingly. Worth the effort to read this short book with a powerful punch.

[Peter Geyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earlier today, I received an email from ResearchGate, one of the education-based metric online entities, mentioned by Steffen Mau in this interesting and comprehensive book. It offered me "congratulations" for one of my uploaded papers for the number of people reading it, the online page proclaiming this headed with a drawing of a medal attached to a ribbon, more suitable to very young people.

This was later followed by an email from academia.edu, informing me that someone somewhere looked up my name, inviting me to click and find out who mthey were. I queried this kinnd of thing a number of years ago, but got no meaningful reply, and presume it has some meaning somewhere.

Now, I upload papers to these destinations because I want to contribute to thought and knowledge in what to me is a severely neglected area, sometimes, but by no means always, unfairly judged by many who usually do proper research, but not in this instance. I don't hold an academic post and so am unaffected personally by the metric agenda these sites participate in, which, as Mau points out, are hardly supportive of actual research yet, in the current situation can be crucial to academic employment because of ratings of various kinds.

The Metric Society is a book about many things, and one thing. The one is the quantification of almost everything and the many is its imposition by governments, organisations, employers etc., but also individuals engaged in self-monitoring, for whatever purpose.

For me there are other things to do, and I wonder whether these serial methods of judgement and assessment help any individual at all, with regard to self-knowledge and understanding, which requires reflection of some kind.

Behind the self-monitoring and other metric applications and fashions, is a stereotyped view of human beings, as structured, scheduled, ordered, automatons perhaps. Certainly in exploitative workplaces of the present day, judgements are made at all times of the day. The people who monitor their employees and restrict their movements don't appear to do this to themselves, but they can hold people to account and terminate their employment and general livelihood, with no negative effects to the owners. Such practices, the modern form of Taylorism, are well-known, yet nothing changes and people are exploited. The ethical customer is absent, if they actually exist, but that's another book that remains unread.

One of the interesting things that the author mentions is the unpaid work of the customer, something evident a few decades ago and endemic these days. workers can be held to account because on=f a customer's rating, an obviously dubious system because not everybody rates the same way, notwithstanding the system requires respondents to think and act the same way. Perhaps this is the presumption of "likes" – whatever that may mean.

A while ago, I went into a telco shop to renew my contract, seek advice etc., and the person who served me mentioned that I would receive an email which would ask me to rate his performance.

Now, I'm the kind of person who rarely gives 100% ratings. Customer service for me is functional and if you go to the bank or a telco shop and what you expect to happen, happens, well that's just functional, yet there's a presumption that such service is akin to experiencing ecstasy, or at least excitement, something a refurbished bank promises for instance.

Anyway, the person who served me sait that he needed at least an *, and he said this with some nervousness. Now he was competent and all that, but I wouldn't have considered anything more than a 5, if asked to rate. Yet here was a clear indication that his employment depended on a random rating that meant different things to different people but only one thing to a particular algorithm.

Of course, by participating in this website, I'm negotiating various metrics. This is a 4, not a 5, because of the way I rate things. It would be unwise to compare the 4 with any other 4 I give, or with 5s or 3s. It's not a universal system an automaton would use. I used to have a Want to Read pile, and a reading pile. but kept getting emails asking me for progress reports, as though reading were a competitio0n, not something of pleasure or interest.

Steffen Mau is excellent on this and other things. Life has been made into competition, with both yourself and others, rather than something to be lived: to read spontaneously, as the spirit moves, and to write something for the consideration of others, not to score points of any kind.

This is an excellent book and I've ordered a number of books referred to in the bibliography. Later on I might look for some journal articles and similar work. This is an important topic, which to me hangs in many ways on whether current society requires citizens to be psychologically unconscious and to accept what is gpoing on with regard to exploitation in workplaces, education, health and elsewhere, or whether it is possible to be different and not literally quantified and described by an algorithm, or any other label or process.

[Peter Aronson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Numbers have a way of getting your attention. They are easier to comprehend then messy qualitative data, and they are easy to compare. But they are often simplifications of reality, and they are never the entirety of the subject described. But our society likes to put numbers to practically everything, and treat them as if they were the thing itself. And this is an increasing trend.

Mau's book talks about all the sorts of number that are collected these days, financial numbers, health numbers, social media numbers, and how they follow us around and allow comparisons to be made between us, and how they encourage competition among us for the best numbers. And it is true, we collect numbers, we compare numbers, and we curate our numbers. And it is only getting more so. Reading this book made me see how many numbers I was looking at and how seriously I was taking them, even when they were essentially next to meaningless.

Many of these numbers are harmless or irrelevant, but many can be used to help or hurt us. And most of them are owned by "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" who clearly do not have our interests at heart, such as insurance companies, banks or social media companies. But Mau attempts to be even-handed about these numbers, and does point out that they can be useful and lead to transparency and self-improvement. But at the end of the day, he doesn't seem all that optimistic about it.

One related trend he missed is gamification, where someone using a service of some sort gets "points" of some sort using the service in some way, hopefully giving a the user a hit of dopamine as a reward. This always seemed infantilizing to me.

The major problem with the book is its language. I don't know if this is due to the author or the translator, but instead of using Standard Written English, it is written in Academic English (see the essay Authority and American Usage in David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster and Other Essays for the difference), which renders the arguments faintly ridiculous at times. Sentences like: "This visibilization of vital parameters can be ascribed to a general trend of self-direction and 'self-reification' which is associated with, and lends further impetus to, the present sustained wave of rationalization and scientification." do not do the author's arguments any favors. This is a problem is shares with What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing, which covers subjects that partially overlaps with Mau's book.

(Mau claimed in the introduction to "temper the sociological jargon", so I suppose this could have been even worse. But I will note that when I did my Geography degree 42 years ago, social scientists (in the US anyways) did not write like this!)

Still, despite its flaws, this is a thought-provoking book.

[Jupri Zulprianto · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminds me of the popular saying: the death of a person is tragedy and the death of thousands is statistics. This book does not say that statistics (like rating this book) is not useful, but it can be best made the use by people with personal, economic or political interests. So we should worry about people behind any quantification.

[Jakub · Rating 3 out of 5]

příliš německé: hodně poznámek pod čarou, málo příběhu

https://www.mediar.cz/metriky-umi-byt...

[MichuPichu]

größere teile für ein seminar gelesen

[Ronald J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

In spring 2015 China’s government announced plans to develop a “Social Credit System” by 2020, which would evaluate internet activity, consumption, driving offenses, employment, teacher’s reports, supervisor’s reviews, conflicts with landlord, children’s behavior, as a basis for granting or refusing them certain opportunities in housing, employment or access to credit. The goal is to create a “mentality of honesty.” This represents a quantitative form of social ranking, grading and scoring—the study of sociometrics. Like prices, this provides perceptions of social worth. The author argues that the quantification impacts us in three sociologically relevant respects:

“1. The language of numbers changes our everyday notions of value and social status.
2. The quantitative measurement of social phenomena fosters an expansion of competition.
3. A trend is emerging towards further social hierarchization. Lists or scores ultimately transform qualitative differences into quantitative inequalities.”

The author documents these effects by looking at university rankings, credit scores, rating agencies, health reports on hospitals, social media, health and exercise data (not know thyself, but scan thyself—number of steps, BP, etc.), customer service surveys, academic citations, etc. I don’t think he proves his 3rd effect very well, but no doubt the quantification of everything—the metric society—changes us and our behavior, and I would argue mostly for the worse. As the author points out, “the German word for “measure” (vermessen) has three distinct meanings: 1) it denotes an action performed in order to make a quantitative statement about an object by comparing it with an established standard; 2) is to ‘mismeasure,’ or measure incorrectly. The process used to measure the object in question (systematically) produces mistakes, and the results do not reflect reality. Thirdly, vermessen can be used in an adjectival sense to mean ‘inappropriate’ or even ‘presumptuous,’ which raises the critical question of where to draw the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ measurements.” I love this! I’ve argued elsewhere that numbers give us a false sense of precision and crowd out other forms of knowledge, such as intuition or judgment. The objectivity of numbers is not a fact, but an attribution. It also silences objections and critics: data never lie!

The Thomas theorem: if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. The power of ratings an rankings derives partly from our own belief in them.

American psychologist Donald T. Campbell coined Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

A ‘performance paradox’ occurs when the kind of performance that really matters in a given field doesn’t correlate particularly closely with the measured performance.

I wish the author would have dealt with the moral hazards of measurement more. I also don’t think he understands the concept of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, since he says it doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny? The book is also turgid and dry. I wish he would have told more stories. There are so many ways to illustrate his arguments rather than just reciting dry facts.

[Ed Crutchley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This captivating book gets to the heart of the subject of the pervasion of metrics in all aspects of our lives. The text is condensed and without illustrations, so it comes across as a little dry, but barely detracts from the importance of the subject. Definitely worth reading.