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.

To some degree I earned it I guess. The badge was a combination of virtual and physical accomplishment. I certainly walked many miles aimlessly through San Francisco “exploring” the city yesterday. But really?

Welcome to the world of Social Objects, an ever-growing playground of online visual toys created to illustrate or add feeling to our interactions. Facebook has gifts, a socially recognizable form that a friend is willing to buy to represent attention, thought, and friendship. On twitter, the act of retweeting has become a sort of socially recognized “kudos” to the original tweeter. Flickr, and YouTube have a favorite or “thumbs up”  to add to your favorite video or image, a way of distinguishing success to both parties. Remember Mafia Wars on Facebook? Who thought a text-based mafia game would become a 100 million dollar phenomenon? The game builds from actual friends and is completely badge-based. And of course Foursquare, the first truly successful geo-tagging game that awards people for checking-in and physically moving a lot. The list goes on.

These objects aren’t unique, but rather infinitely abundant to anyone willing to earn them. So who cares? Well it’s the interaction these icons represent, the interaction of an actual person who thought and spent time to accomplish the badge. The emotional quality these images, badges, or tokens bring to the virtual space. It seems we, as “real” people are always finding subtle ways to gain achievement and to reward one another in a socially recognizable way. We are emotional creatures after all.