ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a slice of social ecologies, to digital writing practices and processes. It explores the complexities of the techno-optimistic view of "quantified writer" in an era mediated by digital, networked capacities and computer-mediated instruction and assessment. The chapter borrows its name from the techno-optimistic "quantified self" discourse that proliferates media. This discourse, argue Ruckenstein and Pantzar, rests on underlying beliefs that through the feedback of quantified information about the self, "reality" is made transparent and can be optimized. The digital writer treads across an impressionable landscape. Structured and unstructured, quantified traces of composing actions and interactions are collected, tagged, fed back, and stored. Questions about the mechanisms for gathering the data, for who and what purposes, for how long, and how much are critical to consider, particularly in an era mediated by digital, networked capacities, and computer-mediated instruction and assessment.
