And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed. On MedHelp, one of the largest Internet forums for health information, more than 30,000 new personal tracking projects are started by users every month. Foursquare, a geo-tracking application with about one million users, keeps a running tally of how many times players “check in” at every locale, automatically building a detailed diary of movements and habits; many users publish these data widely. Nintendo’s Wii Fit, a device that allows players to stand on a platform, play physical games, measure their body weight and compare their stats, has sold more than 28 million units.
Two years ago, as I noticed that the daily habits of millions of people were starting to edge uncannily close to the experiments of the most extreme experimenters, I started a Web site called the Quantified Self with my colleague Kevin Kelly. We began holding regular meetings for people running interesting personal data projects. I had recently written a long article about a trend among Silicon Valley types who time their days in increments as small as two minutes, and I suspected that the self-tracking explosion was simply the logical outcome of this obsession with efficiency. We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?
But I soon realized that an emphasis on efficiency missed something important. Efficiency implies rapid progress toward a known goal. For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.
via www.nytimes.com
There are two very important ideas being brought to the fore in this article. One is that it has become easier and easier to monitor and measure almost every aspect of our lives. And two, without a definite end in mind most of this measurement is utterly pointless.
We are goal seeking entities. When Jaak Landsepp http://docartemis.com/brainsciencepodcast/2010/01/bsp-65-panksepp/ removed the neo-cortex from a bunch of mice and left them with only their limbic system to guide them he noticed that all they did was seek, seek, seek. Searching non-stop all over their cages. We have the drive to seek food, water, shelter built into our most basic levels but we need our whole brain to give meaning to our searches.
In the same way gathering information mindlessly is as if we are only being guided by the most primitive limbic/reptilian part of our brain. Without a thought of collecting data for meaningful ends we stand a good chance of seriously damaging our psyches, individually and collectively.
But what is different about twitter, foursquare, gowalla and all the other social media type services is that they are not just about recording, monitoring and sharing information. At some very important level they are about establishing meaningful connections between human beings.
And it is a numbers game. I have been active on twitter for over a year now and follow about five hundred twitter accounts. In that period and in with number count I have established perhaps five new meaningful relationships with people that I would have been very unlikely to encounter in the normal progress of my life as it was.
A hundred to one seems like a very high ratio but when I think that there was a thousand boys in my school and in seven years I only made four or five good friends (and no, I wasn’t Billy-no-mates,) you can see what an immensely powerful force for creating new connections social media is.
So all that badge collecting on foursquare and blip.fm and the like may seem pointless if immediately gratifying it can and is used to create something more meaningful in people’s lives. Can only be a good thing if you think about it.
Posted by: tmurphy | Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 22:20