Bridging the Gap: Monitoring Self Monitoring
Imagine my delight when I saw that The New York Times magazine ran a cover story by Gary Wolf with the same title and theme as one of my recent posts: “The Data Driven Life“.
It’s a thoroughly researched piece about the trend of self monitoring, which, it turns out, has become a sizable sub-culture. I have to admit that this came as a joyful epiphany to me.
Wolf’s central insight is that conditions have arisen which will take a behavior (which is a natural inclination for many, but impractical for most) mainstream:
“Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.”
Here’s a quick round up of some of the sites covered he covers:
Wolf himself has a blog with Kevin Kelly called The Quantified Self. This is an extensive resource and has a library of film clips of talks from Quantified Self Meet Ups.
drinkingdiary.com is a very simple piece of software that allows you to keep an accurate tally of alcohol consumption, on the basis that what gets measured, gets better.
Moodscope is an online tracker of your mood or mental health, with the twist that it reports this information to your friends, on the basis that, “there’s solid scientific evidence that the very act of knowing you’re being watched can change the way your mind works for the better”.
Goodreads allows you to keep track of and share the books you’ve read and what you thought of them.
Medhelp is a sophisticated mult-purpose site that includes a tracker for weight and exercise and other health indicators.
There are many others out there. Clearly, these sites could become as addictive as the behaviors they purport to cure!
As an experiment on the efficacy of these sites, I’ve undertaken to monitor my drinking, weight and exercise habits for the next month and will report back on what effect self-monitoring has on me.
