Oura is a multi-sensor ring that monitors and cross-examines your sleep as well as daytime activity to produce a “readiness score”. This score can then be used to inform the user’s behaviour change (how bedtime/diet may impact sleep quality) to gradually and ultimately optimise one’s health and performance. Affect, understood loosely (and should perhaps only be understood as such), is an ineffable, dynamic quality that evokes an “ongoing”, felt connection between the body (self) and the world (physical or otherwise) (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). Reflecting on the desensitising effects of academic training, Navaro-Yashin (2003) has urged readers to think and write affectively as a way to textually reconstruct subjective experience both of the writer and the research participants. In this case, placed next to one another, Oura and affect seem to constitute a juxtaposition of rationality and emotion. Yet, it is precisely through this apparent opposition that we may truly grasp the essence of Oura.
My Oura app
The above screenshots show a little readiness score, as an “objective” evaluation of the state of your existence, presented with a picture of nature and a description of what to expect from the day ahead. It seems as though the interface is a temporary portal through which the user’s position in the world is united and materialised. Robbins (2002) has described this abrupt, intense visualisation of unity as “sublimity”. Meanwhile, perhaps also reflected in this is the influential role played by technological gadgets, as objects of rationality, in popular culture, to which Ames (2018) has referred as the technological sublime – the “astonishment, awe, terror, and psychic distance – feelings once reserved for natural wonders or intense spiritual experiences” ( p.2).
So, what really is Oura? It is simultaneously an object, a practice, a feeling, and also a series of catchy slogans (see picture above). Yet, listing out all these miscellaneous facades rationally remains unhelpful to understand a ‘thing’ that, if you dig deep enough, cuts through all domains of everyday life to the crux of our existence (why should I track myself, why do I want better sleep, productivity to what ends, why should one wake up, and so on). Here, we reach the edge of rationality and are tempted with an infinite number of just-so theories.
As the “ongoing-ness” of life is given a new, numeric mode of existence constructed according to different biological metrics, the sublimity manufactured by Oura transcends the ephemeral “moment of insight accompanied by a surge of power” (Robbins, 2002, p. 85), and blends into a sustained form of concreteness. In a world of decaying scientific authority and contradictory expert opinion (Beck, Giddens, and Lash, 1994), self-trackers like Oura may “reliably” step in to tell you how to live an everyday life that seems at times mundane, tasteless, and disorienting (work hard enough and at least you get a picture of sunshine).
References
Ames, M. G. (2018). Deconstructing the algorithmic sublime, Big Data & Society.
Beck, U. Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive modernization : Politics, tradition and aesthetics in modern social order. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2003) ‘`Life is dead here’: Sensing the political in `no man’s land’’, Anthropological Theory, 3(1), pp. 107–125.
Robbins, B. (2002). The Sweatship Sublime. PMLA, 117 (1), pp. 84-97.
Seigworth, G and Gregg, M. (2010). An Inventory of Shimmers. Introduction to the Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
anthropology of infrastructure 2019 