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Overview: Record Time

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We live in a time of records. Every day, we generate thousands, even tens of thousands of records about ourselves. Some we create deliberately, like photos or emails. Others are part of our official life, like birth certificates, marriage certificates, medical records. And then there are those that exist because of the strange digital world we now live in. Browsing history, products we liked, people we met, places we visited, articles we read. So many records about us now exist that you could write whole stories about people’s lives with nothing but records. Which is exactly what I’m proposing to do!

❓ What is the Record Time project?

⭐ Eventually:

An epistolary novel ‘written’ with nothing other than records.
Specifically, a love story between two people, told with documents and data from their lives. Google Search history, GPS records, WhatsApp ghostings, medical prescriptions, right-swipes, heart rates, porn watched.
All of this data, shown with infographics and visualisations designed to move the plot forwards.

💫 Initially:

A series of short stories that:
  1. Test and prove the Record Time concept
  1. Build the Record Time audience
Each short story will focus on a particular widely-used app, with the first based on data from a single person’s Tinder account.

📖 Introduction

Imagine the story of someone’s life told not with words, like a novel, or video, like a movie — but with records.
Our lives can be seen as a catalogue of records. Records that we create, and records that are created about us. Told in this way, a story could start with a birth certificate. Or before that, the purchase receipt for a car seat. Or even further back, a text inviting someone to a party.
This project is about creating a new way to tell stories — one that also tells us about the time we live in.
The number of records we generate now reaches thousands a day, even if we’re not aware of it. Timestamps of when we pick up our phone, how long we use it for. Histories of the websites we visit, and the people we call. Emails we write at work, emails and messages we receive from our family.
And other creepier records. The porn we watch, stashed on some server on the other side of the world, the secret fears we type into Google. Our location, tracked 24/7. The articles we choose to read, which reveal the way we think.
Creating a story from these records will show how linked our lives are with the digital realm while we’re alive, and what will remain of us in bytes after we die.

🤔 I still don’t get what it actually looks like?!

A series of blog articles, where each article will consist of a bunch of infographics and data visualisations (charts, etc.) that fictionally represent the kind of things you could find out about a person if you were a data scientist with God-level access to every database on earth.
It’s not so much about imagining raw data, but imagining the analysis and insights that you could come up with if you had access to all the raw data.
(And, news flash: data scientists all over the world do have access to this raw data, and can know the things about you that Record Time will surface.)
So: analysis and insights, in the form of infographics and data visualisations, will combine to tell a story about a person.
👁️ See what the first short story, based on the Tinder data of someone called Josh, will show.
  • ❌ How Josh tries to delete Tinder every few weeks but keeps coming back
  • ⏱️ The hours Josh spends on Tinder, and how he uses it late at night in particular, as well as (probably) when he is sitting on the toilet
  • 🔥 How his probability of swiping right tends to increase late at night, perhaps because he is lonelier
    • And how he often tweaks the age range of women he gets shown
  • 🗨️ A breakdown of his most successful Tinder conversations
    • Which shows which ‘converted’ to phone numbers being exchanged and which didn’t
    • And which are the most frequent words used in successful (’converted’) conversations
  • 🔡 The way his bio evolves over time as he changes his outward personality to try and convert better
  • 🖊️ The way his opening lines also evolve over time, sometimes in depressing ways
    • We see how he deploys the same carefully crafted opening line again, and again, and again
Digging deeper into the actual story of Josh:
  • 💔 We see that there is an 11 month break in his usage of Tinder after one particularly long conversation which did convert to phone numbers being exchanged, and infer from this that he ended up in a relationship with this particular woman. But it presumably ended, because he comes back to Tinder
  • 🔦 We see that his Tinder tactics change for a short while after he comes back to Tinder. He’s swiping right more indiscriminately, putting out more generic opening lines
  • 👥 We see problematic facts about Josh’s racial dating preferences, and we see how these evolve over time e.g. he stops dating women of a certain race after what we presume was a failed relationship with a woman also of that race
  • 💳 We see him eventually pay for Tinder Premium, which hugely affects the time he spends on Tinder. Now that he can see profiles of women who have already swiped right on him, the power dynamic is changed and he in fact connects with far fewer women, but with higher quality interactions
A similar story will be written for seven other widely-used apps.

🎯 Why are you making Record Time?

For three reasons:
  • First, to show how creepy the world of data that we live in is, and to bring data to life. We struggle to imagine the vastness of the data that exists about us, and even more crucially, to take the next mental leap, which is to realize the profound and disturbing facts and stories that any good data scientist could infer about us from our data.
  • Second, to show the strange beauty of data, as a trace that each of us is leaving in the world, whether we realize it or not. This is a new facet to human existence that has only recently come into being; an additional layer of marks we make on the universe. Think about it: right now, in data centers and on devices scattered across the world, exists a whole side of you.
  • Third, to showcase a new form of storytelling fit for the digital age. And I hope that this form of storytelling will evolve. The first two projects I’ll work on for this form of storytelling will be relatively straightforward (described above), but after those, I’ll start thinking about dynamic Record Time formats; for instance collaborative games that people can play with each other, taking the role of data science detectives going through data to piece together a narrative themselves, or even creating data for each other to try to understand.

📚 How will it be published?

Each short story (and then, chapter of the novel) will be its own page on a blog. Later, I’ll publish the novel in the format of a graphic novel.

🎭 Who are the audience?

Initially, ethical tech nerds like me. Eventually, I hope this’ll reach a larger group of people who are curious about how data is shaping what it means to be human.

🎨 What else will Record Time be about?

The Tinder short story is just the start. Here are some other things Record Time might show:
  • 🫂 Facebook and Instagram friend/follower counts over time. Periods in life where this increased quickly, and then plateaued. Aggregate message history on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that reveals the way relationships in a person’s life ebb and flow.
  • 🔎 Search history over time, with key themes highlighted — showing a person’s search for meaning on reaching adulthood.
  • 🗺️ Two people’s location histories over time, tracked from phones, showing the first time they meet, and then how they spend more time with each other and less with their families as their relationship evolves.
  • 🌄 A person’s Airbnb bookings, and what those say about their social life. Bookings for 10 people (going on trips with friends), then 2 people (in an intense relationship) then 1 person (break-up), then slowly back up to more people.
  • 🖌️ DeviantArt account interactions, with a few uploads in the early years but going to zero after dreams of becoming an artist die.
  • 🙈 Porn preferences over time.
  • 💻 Read-out of the file structure on a person’s Dropbox and how much engagement there is with the various folders, showing the things the person cares about most in life and giving a window in to their personality by how they organize themselves.
  • 🍸 Purchases of alcohol, tracked using data from bank account, and the evolution of a person’s drinking lifestyle over time. Also: usage of app to track sobriety.
  • 🎥 The data generated in the course of a camgirl’s professional life.
The strength of the novel, as opposed to the various short stories, will be that data from different areas will be juxtaposed, to show (for instance) that:
  • 📉 A person suddenly goes from messaging someone all the time to messaging them not at all.
  • 🎟️ And at the same time, stops booking events, Airbnbs, restaurants for two, and resumes a lifestyle of being single.
(The reason a lot of the examples above relate to a relationship is that the novel will be a love story of two people.)

➡️ What are the next steps?

🔍 Research

Get my hands on as many current and former Tinder data scientists as possible, to inform the first short story.

🪟 Build in public

Write about Record Time as I make the stories, and get feedback live to make the stories better

🏘️ What else could Record Time turn into?

I’m glad you asked! I’m hoping that eventually I’ll be able to produce:
  • Record Time stories written with, by and about people at the heart of today’s struggles for freedom, equality and justice. People who identify as LGBTQ+, people from Global Majority backgrounds, people in poverty throughout the world, sex workers and other marginalized professions, people fighting for freedom from autocracy.
  • Record Time stories told with raw data (instead of infographics and data visualizations). The reader will be invited to join a Discord and, together with fellow travellers, use analysis tools to try to form a narrative of what is happening to the main character. Think of it like a more advanced version, instead of the first more user-friendly stories that I’ll write.
  • 🎮 Record Time games, created by enthusiasts, where players create their own fictional data sets and analysis, building a universe and a story as they go.
  • 🛠️ Record Time as a tool that other writers can use in their novels or screenplays. If we show the power of data as a narrative tool, I’m hoping that this may popularize the usage of data or data visualisations in fictional stories, whether they be in print or on screen.