Self-Optimization via Figures and Digital Parameters – Psychic Repercussions of Digital Measurement and Comparison

The enormous increase of quantification techniques in the digital age and their expansion into all areas of life generate new mechanisms and imperatives of self-optimization through numbers and digital parameters in relation to body, work, and relationships. The paper discusses features and aporias of increasingly parametric self-optimization as well as the paradoxes of the hermeneutics of numbers that come into play in the process. With reference to case studies from the research project “The Measured Life,” psychosocial and psychological meanings of digital measuring, counting, and comparing as well as the fascination for these operations are differentiated. Of central importance are the dynamics of externalizing affect or norm regulations in the context of contemporary measurement-based self-optimization.