Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. We have pedometers in the soles of our shoes and phones that can post our location as we move around town. We can tweet what we eat into a database and subscribe to Web services that track our finances. There are sites and programs for monitoring mood, pain, blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, cognitive alacrity, menstruation, and prayers. Even sleep—a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you're unconscious—is yielding to the skill of the widget maker. With an accelerometer and some decent algorithms, you will soon be able to record your sleep patterns with technology that costs less than $100.
We're aware of how absurd this sounds. Self-knowledge through numbers. What could that possibly mean? Of course you can learn things about yourself through numbers—weight is probably the most common personal metric—but self-knowledge has connotations that go beyond quotidian facts. "Know Thyself" was inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, held up as an ideal in Latin and Christian philosophy, and recycled by generations of advice mongers. Self-knowledge was obtained through introspection and reflection; that is, through words.
But the newest tools open possibilities for personal tracking in areas of life that had always seemed inaccessible to quantitative methods. Diarists often chronicle their moods, creating a paper trail that provides a sense of mastery over fleeting emotions. There is a problem, however, with this sort of old-fashioned journal-keeping: You record your mood only when you're in the mood to do so, which introduces a bias. If you impose a regular schedule, noting your feelings at the same time every day, you face the issue that mood varies predictably with time of day and regular cycles of activity. It might seem that we're simply incapable of reliably tracking our own subjective states, but social scientists solved this problem years ago: Just randomize the time of inquiry. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson reported early results using such methods back in 1983, launching a productive line of research in psychology. At the time, of course, this was work for professionals with programmed watches. It wasn't clear how you would direct a random inquiry to yourself.
With today's technology, such things are now trivial. There is open source software for random experience sampling. This feature is already embedded in tools like Happy Factor, a Facebook app that randomly pings you with a text message, to which you respond with a number indicating your happiness level. There are protocols for measuring mental fitness that take less than five minutes to complete and provide a baseline for experiments on your brain's agility. The Web site CureTogether lets users log an enormous range of conditions, symptoms, and feelings. Modern self-tracking systems can measure our bodies, our minds, and our movements.
But can they measure our narcissism? The question comes up often enough to require an answer. My original impulse, after I'd heard it three or four times, was to investigate it in the spirit of the self-tracking movement—that is, with a number. There is a well-validated psychological test for measuring narcissism that takes only a few minutes to fill out. I administered it to three dozen self-trackers, and the mean score was 0.38, which is within the normal range. But of course, that's not a real answer, because when people ask whether self-tracking is narcissistic, they're not wondering about clinical narcissism. They're wondering about selfishness, narrowness, a retreat from social engagement and social generosity into an egotistical world of self.
Oddly, though, self-tracking culture is not particularly individualistic. In fact, there is a strong tendency among self-trackers to share data and collaborate on new ways of using it. People monitoring their diet using Tweet What You Eat! can take advantage of crowdsourced calorie counters; people following their baby's sleep pattern with Trixie Tracker can graph it against those of other children; women watching their menstrual cycle at MyMonthlyCycles can use online tools to match their chart with others'. The most ambitious sites are aggregating personal data for patient-driven drug trials and medical research.
Self-trackers seem eager to contribute to our knowledge about human life. The world is full of potential experiments: people experiencing some change in their lives, going on or off a diet, kicking an old habit, making a vow or a promise, going on vacation, switching from incandescent to fluorescent lighting, getting into a fight. These are potential experiments, not real experiments, because typically no data is collected and no hypotheses are formed. But with the abundance of self-tracking tools now on offer, everyday changes can become the material of careful study.
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