Boing Boing on GOOD: You Are Your Data
My latest contribution to the "Boing Boing On GOOD" series is a look at the Quantified Self, the idea of collecting deep personal data to better understand how you are, and who you are. From GOOD:
Since 1955, Jerry Davidson has obsessively written down everything he does during the day: visits to the store, telephone calls, meals, sex. Davidson has an impenetrable code, involving abbreviations and multiple colors of inks. A star on the top of a page means Jerry had a good day. Davidson never writes in the first person though, always in the third. He takes himself out of his experiences. His life is raw data."The Quantified Self: You Are Your Data"
When I first heard Jerry’s story, on a 1998 episode of This American Life, I thought he was just another interesting eccentric, like so many people featured on that radio program. Hearing the same program a few weeks ago though made me realize that Jerry Davidson is a pioneer. If Jerry lived in Silicon Valley and ran in the right nerd circles, he’d realize he isn’t alone in his unique habit of self-measurement. Indeed, he’s just another “quantified self,” a person who embraces the technology at hand—in his case scraps of paper and colored markers—for deep self surveillance and analysis. A growing number of individuals are using new sensors, social networks, online data repositories, open-access science journals, and sheer discipline to view their bodies, minds, and spirits through the lens of data.
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More opportunity for culture-jamming. This, I like.
I swung by the GOOD site the other day. Very nice.
Immediately thought of Daytum.com, but the amount of data-sets is too limited to really track your entire life. Its like an intro to the Quantified Self.
We forget most of what we do. Thank goodness we can filter out most of what we call life.
Yes, I started at daytum after the last time this topic was posted, but, while I'm still at it, it's way too limited for much interesting use yet.
I'm hoping that in the future they'll have better ways to enter data, more (and more accurate) displays of the data, and, most importantly, ways to show how different datasets interact. It's this interaction (and the different ways you can display interactions) that would be most interesting.
This also reminds me of Demetri Martin's "If I" show where he talks about when he did this sort of thing.
I find this all sort of sad, really. It's almost as though in a technocratic "value" system, the only valid form of self-analysis is to cobble together anything that can be quantified. What about all that cannot be quantified? That's where life is happening, I believe.
"Neutered" , "deracinated" , "Atomised" - these words come to mind.
YOU ARE NOT YOUR FILE.
Is this covert advertising for Cory's Hugo Novella ? (Go read it, by the way, it's brilliant).
Other than this...am I the only one that finds this rather sad/scary ? I mean, if this allows some people to live better, it's fine. But should it become an end in itself ?
A long drive is made easier when we know where the journey ends. Attempting to quantify your self reflects your discomfort with the uncertainties of life. It seems like an attempt to reach peace not through understanding how things are, but by reducing them to a format more readily understood.
Exactly, Pinehead.
I get these urges too.
This is not the first time someone's said this today, but "The territory is not the map."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map-territory_relation
sounds like the mentat school.
yes.
[b]yes.[/b]
FINALLY.
This seems like the opposite of a good idea to me. I already overthink everything as it is; this looks like just enough additional data to reduce me to absolute paralysis.
@ #7 Uland
Yes, but advertisers and governments believe you are. Isn't that terrific? I learn every day. For a long time, I thought the solution to avoiding being observed, tracked, and sold to was to remain off the grid. Then I began to realize that like any system, it can be gamed.
Game the system. Give them a file that will flip many wigs. Enjoy life.
Playing that came seems to me to be the opposite of enjoyment.
I know the "unexamined life is not worth living", but isn't this taking it too far? If an athlete is measuring times and strength and heart rate in order to achieve a goal I can understand it, but what is the goal here, "being a better person"? Well. . .just be better then, don't measure your life out in coffee spoons.
A good jazz musician studies the chords and scales and charts for years, but when the time comes to play, he just plays, and the less he thinks about it when playing, the better it sounds.
Sure, I understand, collecting even the most mundane and ignominious data might reveal a deep insight, but the guy who started notating his every move in 1955-- what conclusion has he reached? "I gotta stop eating so much cheese"?
i kept a journal for a year or two- more or less until i ran out of pages.
it was great. i am a pretty interesting guy!