It’s that time of year. No, not the holidays. It’s the season of Spotify Wrapped — and, apparently, Many Other Things Wrapped.
Spotify and other music streaming services, such as Apple Music, aren’t the only companies releasing wrapped services this year.
YouTube launched its own “recap” feature to summarize all the creators and content you’ve consumed this year. Running app Strava plans to roll out a “Year in Sport” recap for its users next week. And last year, apps like Partiful, Duolingo, and even Asana partook in the data wrapping trend.
Why do we care so much about seeing all of our personal data summarized, though?
“In general, people love looking in the mirror,” said Jad Esber, who’s building an app called Shelf that lets people document all sorts of media they’re consuming in real time. “People are fundamentally really interested in themselves.”
Seeing our personal data reflected back to us helps people understand themselves and is an instant conversation starter, Esber said.
Spotify Wrapped culture has some people documenting their personal data and wrapping it each year. One of them is Neha Halebeed, a 24-year-old in New York City who recaps her own annual personal data, such as every ice cream flavor she tried or everything she bought.
Halebeed said she’d love to have her Gmail, text messages, or phone calls wrapped.
There’s an opportunity for every social media platform to get in on the fun. Some should absolutely try this out. Others should think twice.
“Not every data needs to be wrapped,” Halebeed said.
There’s also the argument that our obsession with collecting and now sharing our data is a form of surveillance.
Here are my pitches about what tech companies should (and shouldn’t) roll out their own wrapped products:
- TikTok and Instagram. Let me see my favorite videos! Tell me about the rabbit holes I went down on TikTok. Tally how many videos I sent to friends without a response. How many followers did I lose this year?
- LinkedIn, hear me out. Imagine if you got a recap of all the connections you made that year. Or a summary of who your top profile viewers were. Or a defining label for your genre of LinkedIn poetry.
- Can the streaming services hold hands for just one day? I’ve lost track of all the shows I’ve been watching this year, and Letterboxd still doesn’t do a great job of tracking TV. I want to know how many hours I’ve clocked on each streaming service and what I spent the most time watching. This could have the added benefit of helping me see which services I’ve hardly been using.
- Literally every dating app. People have already taken this into their own hands on TikTok, creating slideshows that summarize the number of dates they’ve gone on or how many times they’ve been ghosted. But imagine if the dating apps let you know how many times you swiped, your most liked profile photo, or the profiles you matched with but never followed up with. This could also be a horrible idea, I admit.
- ChatGPT. This is a plea. Don’t do this, please. I don’t want to know. It’s bad enough that it logs every query and remembers what I’ve said before.
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