Thanks to Bethany on twitter I came across this great post by Stephen Wolfram on The Personal Analytics of My Life. Wolfram is not the first person to use computers to track his activities and then understand himself. Microsoft Research has a project MyLifeBits that is “an attempt to fulfill Vannevar Bush‘s vision of an automated store of the documents, pictures (including those taken automatically), and sounds an individual has experienced in his lifetime, to be accessed with speed and ease.” The project is digitizing and following Gordon Bell and they have released a book Your Life, Uploaded. We could even go back to the ancient Greek aphorism “Know theyself” that motivated Socrates and which, in its Latin form (temet nosce), shows up over the door of the Oracle in the Matrix.
Wolfram is an example of a particular approach to knowing yourself – namely an approach of quantifying yourself. I personally find the quantified self less creepy than the overheard self of the Microsoft project. What is interesting is how many tools there are now for gathering data about oneself. Perhaps the best known is the Nike + iPod Sensor that tracks your jogging and motivates you while you jog. They have deployed all the tricks of gamification and social media for those who think toys and others will goose them to exercise more. (I’m hoping there is a decent and critical study of this phenomenon. It might turn out that you get a burst of toy-induced exercise that craters when the novelty wears out.)
It would be interesting to leverage the history of philosophical calls for self-knowledge against the emerging fascination with self-quantification. What can you really learn from your email other than how much you send and when you send it? Could we use text analysis to get at what you email?