This week I try self-tracking with a bunch of iphone apps
A few years ago in New York I interviewed a bunch of women who’d taken it upon themselves to track their entire lives – via video cameras attached to their heads – so that you and I could follow online their every move. Ablutionary and otherwise. And in real-time. Wow!
These “life casters” – glossy, 20-something self-marketing machines with indulgent shoe collections – told me, like, this is the future, babe. I was perturbed and put it down to a ghastly fad. But I’ve been proven wrong. In the past few months the “self-tracking movement” has indeed gained momentum.
I swear, any moment now you’ll be bludgeoned by this 2.0 phenomenon of using various apps, sites and gadgets to log, track and analyse the minutiae of one’s life. Tim Ferriss, he of The 4-Hour Workweek mega-fame, is a self-tracker and has just published a new book, The 4-Hour Body, all about it. It went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list last month (Dec). Ferriss has tracked his every workout and blood test for the past decade and used this data to develop his extreme weightloss theories. The QuantifiedSelf.com, an online community that shares the latest tracker developments, launched an Australian chapter last year, and newer, shinier apps are being launched daily.
Now I concede my tone thus far into this week’s exploration has a distinctly skeptical flavour to it. I’ll henceforth try to be more Swiss vanilla as I outline the benefits of self-tracking. Some self-tracking is out and out (over)sharing. Daytum.com and DataLogger allow you to upload what you ate for breakfast, the streets you passed or (in one case) a list of your irrational fears (in said case: 136). The data is then displayed in glorious graphs for others to check out. Dailymugshot.com sees more than 1000 people a day upload shots of themselves. They then share their archives with others. Just for pervy fun. I find something quite sweet about this. It’s a moment in reaching out, of bearing witness to each other’s lives. Sometimes we do just want to know we’re not the only one who gets pimples between the eyebrows on hot days.