Spotify Digital Diary
One year of data collection printed into a book.
Design Research The amount of data that has been collected on ourselves over the years has been described as a digital diary. While a diary in its true form is a conscious tracking of our lives, our online diary exists with or without our knowledge. A diary written by ourselves can contain whatever perspective we feel like documenting, but a digital diary only allows for a recording of our behavior at the moment. The assumptions created from this document are left open for interpretation from the viewer. My request for my data from Spotify took nine days and included one year’s worth of collected information. The total amount of files was roughly 4MB of raw text documents. This included every song I had listened to with the time and duration along with my adword targeting terms or inferences, search queries, and user data. The contents of this layout reached over 2,100 pages when completed. The final product needed to be divided into 5 volumes to be printed. There were no chapters and the organization of the data files was used to plug in the information. Each raw data file was placed after the other in a two-column 9pt font. When scrolling through the pages the content is monotonous and endless. The scale of just one year of data collection from Spotify brings up the question of if this is even necessary. Spotify does not specify what they use this data for, but the sheer size makes me question if it is worth the environmental impact.