Witnessing

Accounting for everything that goes on in daily life feels overwhelming and basically impossible. In all of our daily activities there's many byproducts and implied processes that might not be immediately evident.

The practice of “witnessing” can change how we conceive certain processes that we incur in each day. This idea of “witnessing” is a matter of perspective. When I wake up and I take a shower, the water I'm using is a secondary character in the narrative I follow of what my day is going to be like. By working with different witnessing practices we can effectively change who this main character is.

What if the story of my day is told from the perspective of water? What information would this change of perspective bring to me? Granted, I'm changing perspective for my own benefit, but my point here is that having the perspective of other parts of processes we partake in daily can reveal a lot about our relationships with these processes.

How can this change of perspective actually manifest? This is where the more tangible side of “witnessing” becomes more relevant. Obviously I can't turn myself into water, but I can monitor the water consumption my apartment has, and I can visualize this with different technological tools. I could have a phone app that visualizes and demonstrates in real time how much water is being consumed.

This is an idea that is somehow already being implemented in current phone systems. On iOS and macOS devices, you get daily statistics for your software usage. A built-in OS utility lets you know how much time you've spent on different apps, and what their category is. This utility reports how much your usage is changing over time, and you can chose to use this information as you will. Maybe realizing you've been using Instagram for 4 hours each day is a good way of re-evaluating your behavior.

I think this becomes a matter of how information can be directed towards the attention of people. We have a limited bandwidth of attention and information we can consume, which I think is one of the most consistent themes we encounter when thinking about the early 21st century – how we're being consistently invaded by overwhelming amounts of information. However, much of this information is often irrelevant. I think it's important to be conscious of what information we chose to consume, as it's an important part of our cognitive diet.

Observing our daily routines with “witnessing” practices makes me think of how the concept of emergence might come up in patterns of our day to day behavior. So far in my experience, emergence is a term often used to describe the behavior of natural systems, and in my own practice is mostly concerned with aesthetics and behaviors in the context of art. However, what if observing our day to day life could lead us to understand the basic characteristics that underpin the emergent behaviors we incur in? What if this new perspective can shed light in small habits we can change that can have a large social and personal impact?