To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov · 15 Nov 2013 · 606pp · 157,120 words
as social movements go, this one would be all about celebrating a common means, not a common end. Such a movement—widely known as the Quantified Self—has in fact emerged over the last five years under the leadership of its two cofounders, Kevin Kelly—the same Kelly who wrote What Technology
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penned something of a manifesto for this nascent movement, which was published—not bad for a manifesto—in the New York Times Magazine, launching the Quantified Self movement not just nationally but globally. In his article, Wolf identifies four factors that explain the meteoric rise of self-tracking over the last few
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to his core.” Scientism is the greatest enabler of innovation known to mankind. Perhaps it’s the hoarding urge that drives so many of the Quantified Self initiatives. Of all the things to be hoarded, data—especially data stored in the cloud rather than on hard drives in one’s bedroom—has
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one discover what the Masons, the Vatican, the Ivy League, and the Man himself desperately want to hide. As one card-carrying member of the Quantified Self movement told the Wall Street Journal, “I want to create connections where I didn’t know that they existed. I’m a natural annotator.” What
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“people will watch their health in a way that’s a little closer to the way that they watch their financial portfolios”). Members of the Quantified Self movement may not always state this explicitly, but one hidden hope behind self-tracking is that numbers might eventually reveal some deeper inner truth about
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logic, of course, even torture is okay—provided the prisoners “strike the right deal” and are well compensated. But if one rhetorical goal of the Quantified Self movement is to spell out all the losses that accrue once our personal data is locked up, its other rhetorical goal is to show that
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for it. It’s interesting to see what people choose to share publicly. Bathroom visits, sexual activity, drug use.” Kevin Kelly, the cofounder of the Quantified Self movement, is convinced that this is what technology has wanted all along. “Privacy is mostly an illusion, but you’ll have as much of it
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to self-track, whatever great benefits it might confer on me personally, ought to be subjected to a much more complex moral evaluation than the Quantified Self evangelists have acknowledged so far. Scott Peppet puts his finger on the problem when he writes, “Your choice to quantify yourself (for personal preference
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to worry about self-tracking, however. In fact, to worry about the phenomenon’s secondary effects might very well already concede too much to the Quantified Self enthusiasts. Understanding the structural limitations of quantification schemes—especially zooming in on what they don’t reveal in their quest to reveal everything—might provide
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world would be an essentially meaningless world.” Now, compare this with Kevin Kelly’s rhetorical attempt to exclude questions of meaning as something that the Quantified Self crowd ought even worry about: “[Our critics say that] only intangibles like meaningful happiness count. Meaningfulness is very hard to measure, which makes it very
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if these effects cannot be subjected to precise measurement, then we cannot know exactly how much good or evil they contain.” In this sense, the Quantified Self does continue in a formidable intellectual tradition, but it also suffers from the numerous weaknesses that bothered Nietzsche and many of his followers: Kelly, like
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, however, the situation is much murkier than our philosophers of tracking let on. Gary Wolf once wrote that one of his main inspirations for the Quantified Self was the idea of the “macroscope,” which, following entrepreneur Gilman Tolle, he defines as “a technological system that radically increases our ability to gather
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what elements we highlight, and what elements we shade will greatly influence what kinds of measurements we generate. One of the great dangers of the Quantified Self movement is that, in their belief in the natural origins of data, adherents will not question—or even reflect upon—the appropriateness of the measurement
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invoked in the name of seemingly unrelated political projects? This exercise will be hard to complete without posing the thorny questions of meaning—which the Quantified Self movement has mostly avoided so far. Robert Crease, author of World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, laments
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well—through something called the glycemic index—but this shouldn’t much bother us here. Whether they track calories or carbohydrates, the apps of the Quantified Self do not, strictly speaking, measure nutrition; they measure, well, calories and carbohydrates. How each of those indicators translates into weight gain and weight loss—not
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satisfaction will no longer be quite as relevant.” Perhaps this is how aesthetics was meant to end, with a bunch of enthusiastic devotees of the Quantified Self movement comparing notes on whether the nudes of Picasso or Degas generate longer erections. Human experience, run through the quantification mill, is reduced to little
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and objectivity will triumph. “Branding, marketing, and even qualitative customer reviews will give way to reports based on blood pressure rates, galvanic skin response, and quantified self-esteem. Instead of thinking with our flighty, emotional, easy-to-manipulate brains, we’ll be feeling with our rational, measurable, hard-to-manipulate guts, crowning
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if the current trends continue, “we’ll be told what we want before we know we need it”; Illich wouldn’t approve). To evaluate the Quantified Self and its impact on public life, then, it’s not enough to simply hope that the tracking devices will help us solve a carefully delineated
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good for nature; if we don’t, then it isn’t. What could be more straightforward? One could probably make a good case that the Quantified Self movement began in earnest once it became common—perhaps even fashionable—to install meters in our homes to monitor household consumption of water and electricity
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for your health, and just a few years later we might discover that the extra weight could actually protect you from many serious diseases. The Quantified Self movement, in its current form, is madly devoted to articulating facts—that’s what numbers are good for—but it still has no way of
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their resource use takes place within the fortress of the family home, detached from the wider social and physical environment.” One might think that the Quantified Self movement, decentralized as it is, would not be subject to similar pressures, but this too seems unlikely, as corporations both manufacture the gadgets used
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attempts at self-tracking tell us? Well, all too often it’s hard to say. Kashmir Hill, a Forbes journalist who has written about the Quantified Self and its numerous applications, expresses a sense of befuddlement over what to do with the results of one such self-tracking experiment. Thanks to some
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habits in the process of using the software. At best, these are correlations. But what use do such correlations have? For some members of the Quantified Self movement, correlation is all that matters. Meet Seth Roberts, who claims that eating butter makes him faster—well, this is what his data says anyway
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experiment.” In science, this is widely known as the placebo effect, and in academic experiments every effort is made to minimize its influence. With the Quantified Self, however, what matters is not knowledge per se but, rather, the utility of various knowledge claims in helping improve one’s health or sex life
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t need to know how such knowledge will be used; much of it is generated and stored preemptively. As Wolf points out about his fellow Quantified Self members, “Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can
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a particular question.” In other words, what Austin takes to be the mark of bad research has somehow become a defining, beloved feature of the Quantified Self movement. To be fair, the aversion to theories and absolute belief in the superiority of big data also form one foundation of solutionism; it’s
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all but gone. Supplying those who want to challenge it further with odd theories of knowledge will only make things worse. The fact that the Quantified Self movement or data miners like Hunch.com can churn out “insights” doesn’t—and shouldn’t—elevate those insights to the status of knowledge, not
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standing up to defend expertise and the practices that create and sustain it. Rather, in their populist mode, they prefer to celebrate movements like the Quantified Self and start-ups like Hunch.com as revolutionary and suitable, even if completely different, ways of replicating previous knowledge structures. They are not—and the
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mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.” —JOHN DURHAM PETERS Long before the Quantified Self movement, Gordon Bell, a high-level Microsoft engineer, was already recording every single detail of his time on Earth. He started doing it in the
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with a SenseCam, Proust would be a sure viral hit on Instagram. Bell has little use for terms like “self-tracking” and “quantified self”; instead, he describes his hobby as “lifelogging.” Numbers play a minor role in his quest; it’s not so much about generating statistics as about taming the inefficiency and
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responsibility to consume information conscientiously and think about its nutritional value. This is an outgrowth of the Quantified Self movement, but with an unusual civic streak. The hope here is that self-tracking and lifelogging will make us more aware of what we read on a daily basis and that we will readjust
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end up doing less physical exercise, which all but restores any lost calories. Occasionally, it’s difficult to draw sharp distinctions between adherents of the Quantified Self and proponents of gamification. Both are funded by the same people, who serve as bridges between different communities, with self-trackers providing the quantitative cover
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uncover some deeper numerical pattern, something that will allow you to discover who you really are. As Gary Wolf notes, “Behind the allure of the quantified self is a guess that many of our problems come from simply lacking the instruments to understand who we are. Our memories are poor; we are
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new world, who needs psychoanalysis—the obsolete practice of narrative imagination—to “take stock of ourselves,” when the algorithmic option looks so tempting? If the Quantified Self movement allows us to establish our authenticity with numbers, social networking allows us to accomplish that in subtler, seemingly more creative ways: by curating the
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such fears may have abated by the end of the last century, it’s unlikely that they have gone away altogether. Both Facebook and the Quantified Self promise to give us concrete, even numerical, proof that we have a deep and authentic identity waiting to be discovered, that we need to carry
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, 2011, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, http://personalinformatics.org/docs/chi2011/kay.pdf. 228 record forty things about her daily life: Alexandra Carmichael, “Quantifying Myself,” The Quantified Self, December 13, 2008, http://quantifiedself.com/2008/12/quantifying-myself. 228 “tracked every New York street he walked”: Jamin Brophy-Warren, “The New Examined Life
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much-more-fascinating-than-goodness-1965587.html . 256 “Soon, we’ll know if the sea urchin”: Greg Beato, “The Quantified Self,” Reason, January 2012, http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/16/the-quantified-self. 256 “we have invested only certain automatic”: Steven Talbott, Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age
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of Machines (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2007), 14. 257 “Branding, marketing, and even qualitative customer reviews”: Beato, “The Quantified Self.” 257 Marissa Mayer . . . talks of “contextual discovery”: M. G. Siegler, “Marissa Mayer’s Next Big Thing: ‘Contextual Discovery’—Google Results without Search,” TechCrunch, December 8
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and-arithmetic-how-much-butter. 264 Sanjiv Shah, who thinks that wearing yellow glasses: Mathew Cornell, “Quantified Self Boston Meetup #5, the Science of Sleep: Recap,” The Quantified Self, April 1, 2011, http://quantifiedself.com/2011/04/quantified-self-boston-meetup-5-the-science-of-sleep-recap. 264 “With self-tracking you never really know”: “The
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Quantified Self: Counting Every Moment,” The Economist, March 3, 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21548493. 265 “Although they may take up tracking”: Wolf, “The Data-Driven
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more we look for patterns”: ibid. 265 “exhaustive data, the Google way of doing science”: quoted in Ethan Zuckmerman, “Kevin Kelly on Context for the Quantified Self,” My Heart’s in Accra, May 29, 2011, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/05/29/kevin-kelly-on-context-for-the
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-quantified-self. 266 “a serious shift in our image”: David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are
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s hat”: Ian Bogost, “Shit Crayons,” Ian Bogost’s blog, undated, http://www.bogost.com/writing/shit_crayons.shtml. 314 “Behind the allure of the quantified self”: Gary Wolf, “The Data-Driven Life,” New York Times, April 28, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html. 314
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Lessig, Lawrence and digital preemption and the Internet, permanence of and regulation and transparency Lessing, Theodor Levy, Steven Liberalism, and technology Licensing effect Lifelogging example of See also Quantified Self movement; Self-tracking LinkedIn Lippman, Walter Liquid democracy LiquidFeedback Lohmann, Susanne London, Jack Longo, Justin Lullaby MacKinnon, Rebecca Macroscopism Madison, James Magnet, Shoshana
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/desires/necessities and nutrition and water and energy consumption feedback devices and water and energy consumption metering systems Quantified Self movement and authenticity beginning of and correlations and hunches and narrative imagination See also Lifelogging; Self-tracking Quick Response Codes Racial discrimination Radical agenda Radio erratic appliance Rand, Ayn Rapid Content Analysis for
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and originality benefits of and correlations and decision making ethics of and gamification and hunches of information consumption and privacy and self-disclosure See also Lifelogging; Quantified Self movement Semiconductor industry SenseCam Sensors 7-Eleven Sexual predators Shapiro, Ian Shaw, Steven Shirky, Clay and critics and digital revolution and Eisenstein Shklar, Judith Shopping
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly · 6 Jun 2016 · 371pp · 108,317 words
cultural drift? Gary pointed out that by relying on numbers instead of words we were constructing a “quantified self.” So in June 2007 Gary and I announced on the internets that we would host a “Quantified Self” Meetup, open to absolutely anyone who thought they were quantifying themselves. We left the definition wide open
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in order to maximize his strength, stamina, concentration, and productivity. He was using self-tracking in ways we had not imagined. Today there are 200 Quantified Self Meetup groups around the world, with 50,000 members. And every month, without fail, for eight years, someone at a
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Quantified Self meeting has demo’d an ingenious new way to track an aspect of their life that seemed unlikely or impossible a moment before. A few
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life (32 percent) sleeping. He used this quantitative review to help him “do a better job,” including remembering the names of people he met. At Quantified Self meetings we’ve heard from people who track their habitual tardiness, or the amount of coffee they drink, their alertness, or the number of times
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they sneeze. I can honestly say that anything that can be tracked is being tracked by someone somewhere. At a recent international Quantified Self conference, I made this challenge: Let’s think of the most unlikely metric we can come up with and see if someone is tracking it
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participants for economic reasons. But a scientific study where N=500, if done with care, can be good enough for an FDA drug approval. A quantified-self experiment, on the other hand, is just N=1. The subject is yourself. At first it may seem that an N=1 experiment is not
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large population studies that often the medicine we take works because we believe it will work. This is otherwise known as the placebo effect. These quantified-self tricks don’t fully counter the placebo effect; rather they work with it. If the intervention is producing a measurable improvement in you, then it
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, you need a control group to offset your bias toward positive results. So in lieu of a control group in an N=1 study, a quantified-self experimenter uses his or her own baseline. If you track yourself long enough, with a wide variety of metrics, then you can establish your behavior
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statistics well. Math is not our natural language. Even extremely visual plots and numerical graphs demand superconcentration. In the long term, the quantification in the quantified self will become invisible. Self-tracking will go far beyond numbers. Let me give you an example. In 2004, Udo Wachter, an IT manager in Germany
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.com, May 17, 2010. 40 to 50 hours to complete: “Red Dead Redemption,” How Long to Beat, accessed August 11, 2015. 10: TRACKING 200 Quantified Self Meetup groups: “Quantified Self Meetups,” Meetup, accessed August 11, 2015. he generates an annual report: Nicholas Felton, “2013 Annual Report,” Feltron.com, 2013. as if he could feel
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, 115, 116–17, 148, 149 proxy data gathering, 255 public commons, 121–22 public key encryption, 260–61 publishing and publishers, 149 purchase histories, 169 Quantified Self Meetup groups, 238–40 Quantimetric Self Sensing, 247 quantum computing, 284 Quid, 32 Quinn, David, 17 Radiohead, 72 randomized double-blind trials, 242 reading, 89
The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social
by Steffen Mau · 12 Jun 2017 · 254pp · 69,276 words
and Points Satisfaction surveys Evaluation portals as selectors Peer-to-peer ratings Professions in the evaluative spotlight Like-based reputations on social media 6: The Quantified Self: Charts and Graphs Health, exercise and mood The collective body Motivation techniques 7: The Power of Nomination The nomination power of the state Performance measurement
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quantification of the social sphere. In short, it is a study of the all-pervasive phenomenon of sociometrics,1 or the metric society. Sociologically speaking, quantified self-descriptions of this kind are not just a reflection of a pre-existing reality, but can be regarded as a generative method of constructing difference
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consuming more and more data for monitoring and performance evaluation. The ethos of ‘living by numbers’ (Duttweiler et al. 2016) currently gathering momentum within the quantified-self movement is essentially a social practice driven by the desire for optimization. As inmates of the ‘digital panopticon’ (Han 2015: 18), we are engaged in
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, buyers themselves can only be rated positively, which is apparently necessary to avoid jeopardizing the expansion of the market and scaring off customers. 6 The Quantified Self: Charts and Graphs No analysis of the metricization of society would be complete without a discussion of the new practices of
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‘quantified self-observation’ (Vormbusch 2015: 13), which are initiated, solicited and conducted by the subjects themselves. These are based on new self-tracking technologies: apps, digital wristbands,
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can be described as ‘life logged in full’ (Han 2015: 102), or ‘lifelogging’ (Selke 2016), meaning that everything that can be is measured and stored. Gary Wolf, a journalist and one of the co-founders of the network Quantified Self, argues that our insecurities surrounding body image can only be overcome by referring
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system of objectivized reporting crowds out the user's own subjective physicality, and many trace the onset of ill health back to unsatisfactory readings. The quantified self can thus come into conflict with the affective self, supplanting it as the ultimate arbiter of our physical and mental states. In short, data can
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. As this capacity advances, the emphasis shifts to more metaphysical ways of describing ourselves. This is what we describe as the qualified self. Where the quantified self gives us raw numbers, the qualified self completes our understanding of those numbers. The second half completes the first half. (Boam & Webb 2014) The collective
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of the quantified self: nowadays, data are stored for longer periods or even indefinitely. Thanks to these tracking technologies, it is now possible to record not just a momentary snapshot, but whole sequences of internal and external physical, activational and emotional states in a process which comes very close to lifelogging. As with
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Pisch (2013) ‘Eight questions about physician-rating websites: a systematic review’, Journal of Medical Internet Research 15/2. Ergo Direkt (2015) Online-Umfrage: Online-Medizin – Quantified Self (23 April), https://ergodirekt.de/de/presse/pressemeldungen/2015/online-umfrage–fit-mit-apps.html. Espeland, Wendy N., and Michael Sauder (2007) ‘Rankings and reactivity
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and illness’ in Research Handbook on Digital Transformations, ed. F. Xavier Olleros and Majlinda Zhegu, Northampton: Edward Elgar (pp. 85-102). Lupton, Deborah (2016b) The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking, Cambridge: Polity. Mahoney, Michael J. (1977) ‘Publication prejudices: an experimental study of confirmatory bias in the peer review system’, Cognitive
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21–5 history 11 impact and consequences of 5, 6 meaning 10, 12–15 risks and side-effects 7, 129–40 role of 35 quantified self 99–110 Quantified Self (network) 99–100 quantitative evaluation see evaluation quantitative mentality 11–12 quasi-markets 116, 118–19 race and assessment of criminal recidivism risk 79
Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson · 11 Sep 2013 · 397pp · 110,130 words
to take extra care of their health to avoid it. Or there’s the story of Alexandra Carmichael, who is the community director for the Quantified Self Web site, and organizes meetups of people worldwide who like to track their personal data. Carmichael had long wrestled with depression, so she wondered if
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, llt.msu.edu/issues/june2011/actionresearch.pdf. “Once I saw the pattern of my mood going up”: Alexandra Carmichael, “The Transformative Power of Sharing Mood,” Quantified Self, June 6, 2011, accessed March 22, 2013, quantifiedself.com/2011/06/the-transformative-power-of-sharing-mood/#more-1911. technologies that let your mobile phone
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sites, 72–77 student writing instruction through, 185–88 and theory of multiples, 58–66 and writing. See writing online Purrone, Ruben, 193 QQ, 246 Quantified Self Web, 90 question-answering, 72–77 sites for, 72–77 on social networks, 230 and Watson supercomputer, 281–82 Quora, 72–74 Rachid, Walid, 255
Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier · 2 Mar 2015 · 598pp · 134,339 words
/data-breach/pay-no-attention-to-that-widget-recording-your-every-move.html. Josh Bersin (25 Jun 2014), “Quantified self: Meet the quantified employee,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/06/25/quantified-self-meet-the-quantified-employee. corporate electronic communications: This is an excellent review of workplace monitoring techniques and their
Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman · 17 Mar 2015 · 527pp · 147,690 words
a plea for foreign aid, or as a way to inform the world of a government attack. Variations of sousveillance have become central to the quantified self movement, in which people use smartphones, cameras, sensors, and other devices to record and analyze data about anything from their eating habits to their daily
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can sell to commercial partners or mine to sell you products and that you must manage in order to extract any value from it. The quantified-self movement may argue that building up such a cache of data about oneself allows for self-improvement, for changing bad habits, for improving health and
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quality of life. But an equally important part of the quantified self seems to be sharing that data, turning the act of self-surveillance into a social occasion. Data becomes something to be proud of, something to
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is always part of a power relationship, with one party trying to monitor, protect, or control another. The kind of self-surveillance practiced by the quantified-self movement could be empowering, but it also requires a tremendous amount of work and vigilance. We’ve accepted corporate surveillance as a price to pay
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prosumption, 270–73 pseudo-events, 104 pseudonyms, 175–78. See also anonymity psychological traits, measuring, 41 Qadiri, Fatima Al, 47, 362 Quantcast user count, 96 quantified self movement and quantified selfers, 137–40 Quartz Web site, 306 quizzes, 119–20 Quora, 161, 199 racism, 170–73, 182–84, 210 Ramsey, Charles, 70
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, 303 in physical world, 298 potential for capricious acts, 133 power relationship aspect, 139 as price of Internet for individuals, 254 privacy violations, 286–87 quantified self movement, 137–40 recycling bins with cell phone tracking devices, 306–7 regulating and managing practices, 310–12 response to, 134–36 of retail shopping
Collaborative Society
by Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska · 18 Feb 2020 · 187pp · 50,083 words
movements and self-tracking in chapter 7, “Collaborative Gadgets,” we describe the various uses of widely available tracking technologies. We examine the principles of the Quantified Self movement and position it within the collaborative society approach. Then we look at various gamification models that rely on wearable trackers and discuss how they
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detecting and reducing smog or radiation.48 Cooperative communities of biohackers strike a balance between activism and entrepreneurship by performing experiments on themselves.49 The Quantified Self trend encourages people to measure their various biological metrics—in the simplest form including heart rate, the number of steps taken per day, or calories
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Profit-maximization-oriented users/producers Nonprofit-oriented users/producers Capitalist platform Platform capitalism, gig economy Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Turo Collaborative economy TripAdvisor, Yelp, Couchsurfing, 9GAG Quantified Self Cooperativist platform Online cooperatives Time banks (Timebank.cc, Hourworld.org) Food co-ops Peer-to-peer lending Peer production Wikipedia, Linux, OpenStreetMap Citizen science Online
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part) constitutes their usability and appeal.21,22 The collaborative component of wearable devices (for the most part) constitutes their usability and appeal. Quantified Self and Quantified Others Quantified self-tracking first appeared in the health sector and then moved to recreational sports and wellness, where the technology became mainstream. Biomarker testing and health
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not exactly the collaborative data sharing access we were emphasizing before, but it is a great incentive to those that mainstream and enable data sharing. Quantified Self (QS) is the term that “embodies self-knowledge through self-tracking.”26 QS practices a different approach to the so-called n = 1 studies (clinical
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. Many individuals use wearable devices, but the most engaged usually join already existing self-tracking communities or establish new ones. Several interest groups such as Quantified Self, HomeCamp, DIYgenomics, and PatientsLikeMe have formed since 2008 to explore, brainstorm, and share their self-tracking experiences. According to the online and offline declarations of
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Michel Foucault, who devoted much attention to the issues of biopower and biopolitics in his lecture series published as Society Must Be Defended.29 The Quantified Self community often stresses resistance toward biopower, understood as the extension of state power over both the physical and political bodies of a population. The notion
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of resistance is frequently emphasized while encouraging Quantified Self representatives (known as QSers) to alter the ways in which mainstream devices operate and perform, and to reverse-engineer them. Data Sharing as a Collaborative
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Practice The members of tracking communities (like QSers) advocate widespread anonymous data usage and sharing, as well as data transparency. Within the Quantified Self movement, for instance, ongoing debates related to the types of personal data gathered and known about each of us today make the subject of open
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that health data is subject to restrictions and expensive to conduct, this project provided a viable way to positively benefit medicine and patients at large. Quantified Self encourages more proactive self-management when it comes to healthcare by engaging with health-related communities that operate in a playful, gamified manner, such as
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sensors—will be fully integrated into everyday experiences as people continue to adapt to the now-ubiquitous presence of digital technology in their lives.”39 Quantified Self and similar communities can clearly empower their members to adopt more proactive attitudes when it comes to their health, well-being, workplace efficiency, workflow, and
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cycles of performance by challenging them to reproduce or “better” their previous records. In itself, this is not bad. According to data we collected at Quantified Self meetups, various QSers characterized themselves as “downgraded” or “mediocre” without a tracker and experienced depression whenever a tracker was not displaying their progress. Some reported
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why they strive to bring trackers into the wellness programs of organizations and corporations and frame them as transparent companions of everyone’s routine. The Quantified Self is currently moving toward the concept of quantified others, in which the n we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter really means “all of
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really empowers individuals and communities, we need strong and savvy communities, capable of establishing rules and representing their interests against device producers. Despite its popularity, Quantified Self is still a minority movement compared to the whole data flow. More collaborative practices could actually help with data accuracy instead of reconciling with data
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pursuing biological experiments); grinder biohacking (altering bodies by implanting DIY cybernetic devices and wearable technologies); nutrigenomics (using nutrition to hack human biology); an in the Quantified Self movement (for measuring activity, behaviors, and biomarkers to optimize health, well-being, and mental states). Bot/Chatbot Software application that runs various tasks online. On
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the roles of creators (active producers) and users (passive users), typically occurring in online media, F/L/OSS, or blogs. Quantified Self A movement as well as a practice also known as lifelogging: using technology (mainly wearable technology) for measuring activity, behaviors, and biomarkers to optimize health, well-being, and mental states. Remix
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and Ethical Considerations in Human Enhancement Technologies (IGI Global, 2014). 12. M. Swan, “Sensor Mania! The Internet of Things, Wearable Computing, Objective Metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0,” Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks 1 (2012): 217–253. 13. R. A. Calvo and D. Peters, Positive Computing: Technology for Wellbeing and
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Shannon and the Making of Information Theory (MIT Press, 2003). 17. M. Swan, “Sensor Mania! The Internet of Things, Wearable Computing, Objective Metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0,” Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks 1 (2012): 217–253. 18. T. O. Zander and C. Kothe, “Towards Passive Brain–Computer Interfaces: Applying
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://perma.cc/7KTH-JFLG 27. R. Cooter, “Biocitizenship,” Lancet 372 (2008): 1725. 28. M. Swan, “Health 2050: The Realization of Personalized Medicine through Crowdsourcing, the Quantified Self, and the Participatory Biocitizen,” Journal of Personal Medicine 2 (2012): 93–118. 29. M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France
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, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (Picador, 2003). 30. D. Lupton, The Quantified Self (John Wiley & Sons, 2016). 31. https://perma.cc/FY5V-KTBA 32. https://perma.cc/K5EJ-JFLD 33. https://perma.cc/WRE6-RQV6 34. https://perma
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M. Pantzar, “Consumers, Producers and Practices Understanding the Invention and Reinvention of Nordic Walking,” Journal of Consumer Culture 5 (2005): 43–64. 50. Lupton, The Quantified Self. 51. D. Nafus and K. Tracey, “13 Mobile Phone Consumption and Concepts of Personhood,” Perpetual Contact 206 (2002). 52. D. Nafus and J. Sherman, “Big
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Data, Big Questions | This One Does Not Go up to 11: The Quantified Self Movement as an Alternative Big Data Practice,” International Journal of Communication Systems 8 (2014): 11. 53. S. Hales, C. Dunn, S. Wilcox, and G. M
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, in leveraging technology, 28 Post-truth, 108 Produsage, 61–62, 71 Project Cyberfolk, 151 Prosumer, 37 Prosumer capitalism, 57 Quality in peer-production projects, 69 Quantified Self, 136–138, 150 Reaction Photoshop meme, 74 RECAP, 89 Remix culture, 72 Research ethics breach, 110–111, 114 Rule establishment, in open collaboration projects, 58
Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel · 4 Sep 2013 · 202pp · 59,883 words
may be best. Nike says its + family of sensor-enabled gear, backed by a strong marketing campaign, had 6 million users in February 2012. The Quantified Self The very high end of these health-related wearable devices is the $199 Basis. Designed for “wellness and fitness,” Basis even tells time but, with
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lets users drill deep down into personal data mines of stats, charts and graphs. It is a particular favorite of a growing movement, called the “Quantified Self,” which is composed of people who believe that the more personal data they have, the better they can understand their own bodies and thus become
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where they just won’t need a doctor. Loic Le Meur, producer of LeWeb, Europe’s largest tech conference, is an ardent fitness enthusiast and Quantified Self proponent. In August 2010, he suggested in a blog post that as people and mobile devices work together to provide highly personalized data, the human
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becoming like The Terminal Man, but today’s picture looks far more positive than the one Crichton painted. As Le Meur demonstrated in his blog, Quantified Self data can build a personal anticipatory system. You can see patterns in your exercise and diet. You can detect correlations between those two factors—plus
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data-driven self-discovery. A small but fast-growing self-tracking movement is already showing the potential of such thinking, inspired by Kevin Kelly’s quantified self and Gary Wolf’s data-driven life. With its mobile sensors and apps and visualizations, this movement is tracking and measuring exercise, sleep, alertness, productivity
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have been out of place at that old East German Ministry for State Security in Berlin. Two of the most hyped companies producing so-called quantified self products at CES were Fitbit, the maker of a wrist device that tracks physical activity and sleep patterns, and Swedish-based Narrative, the manufacturer of
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Panopticon as data factories. Bentham’s utilitarianism, that bizarre project to quantify every aspect of the human condition, has reappeared in the guise of the quantified-self movement. Even the nineteenth-century debate between Bentham’s utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill’s liberalism over individual rights has reappeared in what Harvard Law
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