Social Workout

By the Numbers

Self Tracking Isn't Just for Phds and Weirdos Anymore

Required reading for all mloggers and workout trackers: Gary Wolf's seven page feature in Sunday's Times Magazine. Wolf, is the co-founder, along with Kevin Kelly of the Quantified Self blog, hub of serious self-trackers. Fans of Social Workout's Wired Intern may recall that Wolf coined the phrase "macrocosm" in his last opus on the subject a year ago. This time around, he again chronicles the many emergent self-tracking devices such as Fitbit and Nike+, and also tells the intriguing tales of certain hardcore trackers, like 28 year-old Ben Lipkowitz, who just wanted to keep track of how much time he spent cleaning his roommates dirty dishes.... It's a fascinating read, but in case you're busy at the moment, a few choice bits after the jump....

First, what journalists call the "nut graf:"

For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune [from quantification]. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy. 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.

Mlogging, anyone? But why might this be, possibly, a good thing? 

Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.

So much more to say on all this, but, for now, here's to self-discovery and to uncovering hidden potential!