Tracking Humanity

I wrote it between 2012-2013 for my BA degree in Cultural Anthropology.

Some of my opinions, and many elements of the self-tracking community have changed since this was written. Yet I'm still thinking along many of the same threads, and exploring parallel ideas. It's relevant to the rest of my work, but should be taken with a large grain of salt 🙃

The Quantified Self movement is concerned with exactly what you might expect – quantifying the self.

Aligning their identity with units of measurement and numerical data, they seek a self-knowledge that will lead to the improvement of both the individual, and implicitly, the greater society – the supposed ultimate goal of progressing humanity forward.

The ideology of the Quantified Self movement is important to us because it is not only theirs, in many ways it is our own.

Based in ideas native to the Western world that have now reigned for centuries, their curious conceptions about the body and self are ones we share.

Understanding the historical emergence, beliefs, concerns, and interests of this community will teach us about ourselves as much as it does about them.

Beginning with an exploration of the historical foundations of the West, my theory builds off the work of Marshall Sahlins in bringing attention to how we have a very particularly constructed idea of the “self,” as a need-driven and imperfect being living within a dualistically divided body and mind.

Seeking to fix our supposed imperfections, we cultivated the dominance of science and medicine over our natural bodies by beginning to understand our physical form within the metaphor of machinery.

While the Quantified Self movement in many ways ascribes to these beliefs, and is clearly built upon these foundations of imbuing objective, empirical and quantifiable data with legitimacy, they also challenge and seek to revolutionise the modern institutions of science and biomedicine.

Primarily concerned with the generalised knowledge that the two impose upon individual bodies, the Quantified Self ideology believes each singular person should be able to determine their own personal truths and treatments, leading them to establish and advocate for the joint concepts of personal science and personalised medicine.

I discuss how the technological devices pervasively used within the Quantified Self community are leading them to new experiences of embodiment.

This technological embodiment redefines the boundaries of the self.

It engages us in debates over animated agency, emotional intimacy, and holistically interdependent and interconnected systems. It challenges many of our default anthropocentric attitudes towards the world.

These emerging relationships with technology are indicative of those going on within our greater society. Quantified Selfers should be considered the frontier of those fully embracing these new embodiments.

They construct new identities and ways of being through technology, especially through the medium of data.

Massive troves of immaterial online information become representations of selves in the public sphere, as well as potential channels for manipulation and domination on a socio-political level.

Though many have read the data-collection practices of the Quantified Self community as solely self-surveillance, we find they are actually choosing to generate and control their own information rather than wait for greater social and political forces to do it for them.

We are now all implicated in acts of self-quantification and the rise of data-selves by nature of being digitally connected.

A state which raises a plethora of political and personal complications for us to navigate.

If we are already intertwined in a system of data surveillance, self-trackers may be the ones turning the system into a source of identity, positive meaning and empowerment.

Though they are politically resistant in the field of data surveillance, their underlying ideologies still inherently tie them to fulfilling the needs of a capitalist economy.

They strive to be optimal citizens: organised, productive, timely, fit, and responsible, giving off the social perception of a well-ordered and lived life.

This pursuit is driven by a conviction in the natural goodness of capitalism that resembles religious belief, yet one that fails to result in the transcendent state implicitly promised.

The existence of the Quantified Self movement, a collection of individuals seeking to improve and upgrade themselves in order to manage the unreasonably demanding requirements of the capitalist economy using the same ideological base that brought it into being, should lead us to critically question what they mean by seeking “improvement” in the interests of “progress.”

We should ask what we they progressing towards and whether it truly serves their own interests.

Throughout this critical exploration, and despite the occasional bold conclusion, I do not mean to “other” the Quantified Selfers.

When taken in cultural context, their practices and beliefs are reasonable and rational. The ways we enact these same beliefs are simply more familiar to us – we have been performing them for so long they do not seem alien or absurd to our eyes.

Amassing, meticulously graphing, and developing formulas based on the data points of a morning routine puts these convictions into such a stark light that we react with shock, and often quickly move to ridicule those who practice it.

Out of a lack of empathetic understanding (and perhaps some confusion and fear), many have defaulted to portraying Quantified Selfers as a misguided, fringe population numerically desecrating the sanctity of the human self.

My research explores and challenges both this inaccurate portrayal of the community, as well as the notion that we have a sacred pre-defined “human nature” in need of defending.

The movement is not what many take it as.

They are often holistically humanistic rather than reductively mechanical, diverse rather than monolithic, evolving and dynamic rather than static, and critically questioning rather than passively complying.

Above all other qualities, I found the Quantified Self movement to be defined by a diversity and complexity of opinions.

Members expressed wide varieties of dynamic, evolving ideas and contradictory ideologies. To study, think, and write about the movement as a whole concept and bound community was a challenging and confusing task on numerous occasions.

Despite these rifts and differences, the Quantified Self community indeed shares fundamental and core beliefs about the value of self- improvement through quantified self-knowledge, providing them with enough common ground to engage in building a meaningful social world.

Location: the world of the Quantified Self – the self understood and expressed through numbers, data, and quantified statistics.

Summed up by their tagline “self-knowledge through numbers,” the concept of the “Quantified Self” encompasses a both a cultural ideology and a community of people – who congregate both online and offline – that ascribe to it (Quantified Self 2013).

This distinction between the Quantified Self movement or phenomenon, and the Quantified Self community is an important one.

There is an understanding of a greater “movement” taking place on a social level, believed to be a historical force in itself, with some trackers even calling it “our millennium’s renaissance” (Top Coder Inc 2012).

The movement is driven by specific and historically-located ideas and beliefs guiding this technologically-oriented approach to self-tracking. With it comes an international community whose members self- identify and connect through self-tracking.

Self-Tracking

What members of this community hold in common is the practice of self-tracking: they collect and store data and information about particular aspects of their life and self.

This practice revolves around designing projects that target specific variables. The kind of things that people choose to track is seemingly infinite – ranging from the common areas of sleep, time, physical exercise, and food intake, to the more creative variable of monitoring of Twitter activity, shower temperatures, snoring, and perceived quality of social conversations (Quantified Self 2013).

It is a running joke within the community that any aspect of life you can imagine being tracked, probably is being tracked a Quantified Selfer somewhere in the world.

Keeping tabs on the self is nothing terribly new: Benjamin Franklin is one historical figure known to have written of his adherence to thirteen key values each day (Dembosky 2011).

Self-trackers often like to harken back to such historical individuals, attempting to convey the message that surveying the self in pursuit of improvement has been a noble and worthwhile activity for hundreds of years (Kelly 2012b).

The practice seems to have been an especially prevalent theme in the history of Western culture, appearing everywhere from religious virtues to nationalistic demands of responsible citizenship.

Appreciating the influence of these historically-based ideas on the current Quantified Self movement is central to understanding how and why it has emerged.

In many ways that is part of the real significance of this movement: self-tracking has long been a part of ourselves and our cultures.

It is a practice that all of us can relate to, and engage with in small ways – one that is not only growing rapidly, but also shifting forms.

Advancements in technology have now infinitely expanded the realm of self-tracking – making the practice exponentially easier compared to the old pen-and-paper method. From body monitors to smartphone applications, we are now enabling a new age of the measured self.

History and Founding

The Quantified Self movement does not begin or end with any single individual or set of people.

Instead of being “founded,” its origin story is told as a natural emergence out of the way human interaction with technology is already taking shape.

It would be more accurate to say certain leaders emerged who encouraged and facilitated the rise of the culture, shaping the phenomenon by giving it a name and a central digital space where they could communicate, organise, and establish their identity.

These leaders were Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly who set up Quantifiedself.com – the website acting as the online hub of the movement.

The two were journalists already invested in exploring the social and personal meanings behind technology when they met as co-workers at the forward-thinking magazine Wired in 2007.

One an editor and one a writer, they began to collaborate over their shared interest in a technologically-driven trend both had noticed gaining ground among their social circles in the bay area of California; “people subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary” (Wolf 2010b).

They attribute the rise of these habits to four factors:

• The growing ubiquity of personal mobile devices – allowing people to carry powerful computing capacities around in their pockets
• Advances in the quality, affordability and miniaturisation of electronic body sensors and tracking tools
• Social media’s normalisation of perpetually sharing intimate information; and the rise of “the digital cloud”
• The massive increase in capacity of online data hosting and storage, making its collection seem immaterially infinite. (Wolf 2010a; Kelly 2011)

By 2008, the community had grown enough for Kelly and Wolf to feel they needed to establish a supportive limited liability company: Quantified Self Labs (Quantified Self 2013).

Acting as an organisational support, the structure of the company is simple. There are no full time employees and they have a stated goal of “not making organising QS feel like work” (Butterfield 2012:16).

The community aims to promote an egalitarian and democratic power structure by downplaying officiality and hierarchy.

Community Organisation

The community aspect of the Quantified Self movement is intentional and active; bounded together by voluntary, self-expressed membership, they connect through online hubs that typically include forum posts, twitter conversations, blog entries with streams of discussion comments, and informative resource pages such as wikis. On the central website Quantifiedself.com, they define themselves as a “collaboration of users and tool-makers who share an interest in self-knowledge through self-tracking” (Quantified Self 2013).

As of April 2013, there are currently 111 registered meet-up groups consisting of 18,558 members across 31 nations in 89 cities–these mini-communities are represented in New York, San Francisco, London and Tokyo, and also extend to places such as Rio de Janeiro, Bangkok, Beijing and Cape Town (Meetup 2013). However, as a geographical trend, the the vast majority of tracking communities are condensed within the Global North.

Meet-ups are regularly scheduled, organised events where members can share their stories of self-experimentation. Run through the website Meetup.com, each geographical area has local voluntary leaders who facilitate the monthly gatherings. These meetings centre around a series of slide-show presentations, called “show-and-tells,” which are usually filmed and later uploaded to internet blogs and websites (Christensen 2013).

Anthropologist Adam Butterfield conducted his master’s thesis specifically on Quantified Self community meet-up groups and succinctly defined their content as “personal stories of self-tracking projects” (Butterfield 2012). While this is a simplified description of how the ideology gets communicated between its members and the general public, in a literal sense its is fairly accurate.

The emphasis on storytelling using meaningful data is a key component of the Quantified Self movement. Understanding how and why these stories are told is central to understanding the Quantified Self movement and the cultural forces driving and shaping it.

Throughout this thesis I will cite many tracking tales told through blog posts, personal websites, filmed presentations, and second-hand accounts in articles.

At meet-up presenters are advised to base their talk around three prime questions; first, explain what you did; second, explain how you did it; and third, explain what you learnt (Wolf 2011). Some meet-up communities further structure the story-telling form by suggesting that speakers limit their talks to five minutes, encouraging simple and clear communication (Christensen 2013). The purpose of these presentations is to offer ideas that others might spark inspiration from: different tools and methods for self-tracking, different variables to track, inventive solutions to common problems like trouble sleeping or stress at work.

The movement sees themselves as trying to cultivate a “culture of sharing” (Christensen 2013). The ultimate value they share is seeking self-improvement, and through sharing stories, hope to collaboratively encourage and support one another in that goal. Conferences follow a similar structure but are much larger events, usually drawing members from all over a region (such as Europe or the Pacific Northwest) instead of a single city.

The glue holding this community together is undeniably the website Quantifiedself.com. Much like an ever-expanding family tree, it branches outwards connecting a seemingly infinite number of links to online data logging tools, company pages for commercially produced tracking devices and services, YouTube and Vimeo videos of presentations, reviews of smartphone tracking applications, notable personal blogs of self-trackers, and relevant journalistic and academic articles. It is the central hub of this internet-based society.

Quantifiedself.com features many aspects typical of websites that facilitate open and interactive online societies; social forums, active commenting on blog postings, occasional surveys, prompts for open discussions, frequent guest writers, and interviews with notable community members (Quantified Self 2013).

This includes a number of recurring features such as: “What We’re Reading” – a compiled list of the latest publications and articles related to the Quantified Self movement, “Toolmaker Talks” – question and answer posts with the developers of popular tracking devices and applications, and “Numbers from Around the Web” – a showcase of especially interesting self-experiments and the resulting data from community members (Quantified Self 2013).

This small slice of what type of content is posted should make apparent this website is by no means written or controlled by a single or small handful of individuals.