My Digits

I recently bought a new pair of Nike+ shoes along with the sensor kit, but arrived home to realize I had only bought a replacement sensor for the shoe. I stared at my ipod, wondering if perhaps there was a way in fact to receive the signal. There isn’t, so I sat there, feeling totally defeated, almost as if running wasn’t worth it. This is crazy, because in fact it did not prevent me from exercising or even the quality of the exercise in anyway, like lost headphones may have. Was it really because I wouldn’t log a few miles?  And eventually I had to agree it was. Because now I had a means to record a part of my life that wasn’t easily measured before.

We have happily found ourselves snuggling with named objects that connect us to each other. Phones, laptops, gadgetry, these pieces of technology record us in numbers and start to visualize parts of our lives that we simply guessed and estimated before. I have a Mint account that measures monetary habits and financial information. I check-in on Foursquare so you know where I go physically. And with a sensor in my shoe, I know my running habits. These were once all estimations, but now I have pie charts and graphs that parse and label my life. Im quantifiable and measurable more than ever before.

The cover of the New York Times Magazine recently featured an interesting article by Gary Wolf that explored this very phenomenon among the most extreme cases. He attributes this sudden influx in self-monitoring to four recent changes: Electronic sensors became smaller and more effective, people began carrying computers (mobile phones), social media became mainstream and popular, and finally, the digital “cloud” began forming. These new services now carry popularity with friends, spark competitions, show progress, and help you quantitatively look at things you don’t have to think about anymore. Definitely worth a read.