Features such as Spotify Wrapped confirm that you’re the main character of your internet.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Why are “year in review” roundups so pleasing to users?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The Mundanities of a Private Life
Every December, sites and services that spend the year hoovering up personal information spit out a summary of users’ activity. Call it the year-end quantification-industrial complex. The trend isn’t new: As early as 2014, the exercise-tracking app Strava was releasing a Year in Sport feature, and Seamless was summarizing food deliveries. But especially since Spotify hit word-of-mouth marketing gold with its shareable Spotify Wrapped feature, companies of all kinds have been delivering year-end nuggets of data to their users, whether personalized or in aggregate. These summations appear on services you may never have thought to quantify: Resy sent personalized emails about people’s year in restaurant bookings; Steam quantified gaming; Vanguard sent customers a “Year in Review” summarizing highlights from their retirement plan. (As the last Millennial Snapchat user around, I was personally delighted to receive my annual recap on the app, consisting mostly of pictures I’d sent my mom.)
Tinder’s aggregated roundup announced that the “year in swipe” was dominated by “main character energy.” In a sense, all personalized year-end features provide that energy: They confirm that you are the star of your internet; they allow you to say “That’s so me!” and to see your personality and proclivities reflected back at you. Sometimes they also reveal unflattering truths—Peacock’s year-end summaries, for example, might make you cringe at how much time you spent glued to a screen this year.
On a basic human level, it can feel good to have highlights of your year—-whether photos or beloved songs—placed in front of you. Quantifying your year’s activities can also give you a burst of accomplishment, Barbara Kahn, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, told me in an email: It “makes vague pleasures or activities more concrete.” Such features let you “ascertain whether the sum of activities adds up to an impression of yourself that makes sense,” she added. Year-end features give us rare permission to embrace the mundanities of our private life, the kind that are mostly only interesting to oneself. John Paul Brammer, writing in The Washington Post, called Spotify Wrapped release day “a Dionysian feast of vanity, a day when people drop the masks and admit that no one asked and no one cares, but they want to share their top songs of the year anyway.”
The internet as a whole is fracturing into an ecosystem of personalization, my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote this week. Whatever semblance of a monoculture the internet once had is disappearing. Now, he writes, “more than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture.” This fragmented dynamic means that the “viral” trends and most popular Netflix shows of the year didn’t actually cross the screens of many users. “Popular content is being consumed at an astounding scale, yet popularity and even celebrity feel miniaturized, siloed,” Charlie writes.
Any online service you use builds a landscape at which you are the center; your accounts comprise a flood of disparate content where the only overlapping vector is you. Online, we’re all just disembodied egos, bobbing around in our little streams of data. Maybe the act of holding up a mirror once a year—even a fun-house mirror of personal information wrapped in peppy branding—will spur some reflection on how we live online.
Related:
Today’s News
Dispatches
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
The Neighbors Who Destroyed Their Lives
By Robert Kolker
The Schweitzer brothers see John Gonsalves everywhere now.
In the small towns on the eastern tip of Hawaii’s Big Island, everyone knows everyone, and if you’re not from here, you might never fit in. Everywhere the brothers go, they see Gonsalves’s truck. He’s a small man with a scraggly beard, and runs a business building fences on properties up and down the coast. Rumor has it the business isn’t doing so well. Rumor also has it he funded that business with the reward money he took for sending the Schweitzer brothers to jail.
Sometimes, at traffic lights or in parking lots, Gonsalves sees them too. On these occasions, he smiles a little. Sometimes he even waves. The brothers can’t believe it. He’s waving? They turn and head in the other direction, fast. If they didn’t leave, they have no idea what they might say to the man they believe ruined their lives.
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Watch. The Iron Claw (in theaters), a new biopic about a tragic professional-wrestling family, is a feel-bad movie in the best way possible.
Read. Ben Austen’s new book, Correction, argues that it’s time to reconsider parole.
Play our daily crossword.
P.S.
It may very well be that no one asked and no one cares, but in the spirit of year-end indulgence: My Spotify Sound Town is Portland, Maine; my genre sandwich includes rock and “New Americana”; and I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift, the Grateful Dead, and the National. Do with that information what you will. Happy holidays!
— Lora
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The Uncanny Experience of Year-End Roundups
7
14
23.12.2023
Features such as Spotify Wrapped confirm that you’re the main character of your internet.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Why are “year in review” roundups so pleasing to users?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The Mundanities of a Private Life
Every December, sites and services that spend the year hoovering up personal information spit out a summary of users’ activity. Call it the year-end quantification-industrial complex. The trend isn’t new: As early as 2014, the exercise-tracking app Strava was releasing a Year in Sport feature, and Seamless was summarizing food deliveries. But especially since Spotify hit word-of-mouth marketing gold with its shareable Spotify Wrapped feature, companies of all kinds have been delivering year-end nuggets of data to their users, whether personalized or in aggregate. These summations appear on services you may never have thought to quantify: Resy sent personalized emails about people’s year in restaurant bookings; Steam quantified gaming; Vanguard sent customers a “Year in Review” summarizing highlights from their retirement plan. (As the last Millennial Snapchat user around, I was personally delighted to receive my annual recap on the app, consisting mostly of pictures I’d sent my mom.)
Tinder’s........
© The Atlantic
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Donald Low
Mort Laitner
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
Michael Kwet
