So Appy Together
“Starting QS was about anticipating that this boom was coming, and wanting to produce a context for intelligence and reflection,” Gary Wolf tells me when I get him on the phone in California. He says QS is not about finding answers, per se, but about asking questions and learning more about yourself in the process. He goes on to explain that this convergence of technology and personal data is creating a “new way of being human, and it’s something that we should think and talk about and work out together.”
A new way of being human? That’s certainly not what I thought I was signing up for when I began my own self-tracking about a year ago. I downloaded one of the most popular health apps on iTunes, RunKeeper, which was designed by the local startup FitnessKeeper. As I jog, it tracks my pace and uses my phone’s GPS coordinates to calculate my distance, while its internal coach gives me my splits and tallies my calories burned. RunKeeper’s been called the gateway drug for self-tracking, and after getting the initial bit of data, I did feel a dopamine surge in my brain. As I kept using the app, I got hooked. I’d receive e-mails when I hit a new distance goal, and would share my runs on Facebook, where friends would cheer me on, adding to the warm-fuzzy feeling. Later, I learned that I was experiencing what researchers call the Hawthorne effect: the idea that test subjects improve upon an observed habit simply because it’s being watched. Socrates famously said that an unexamined life isn’t worth living. And sure enough, I began to feel like I needed to run with my phone for my workouts to really count.
Then last summer, I noticed that all of the maps of my runs were being logged online, and made searchable by Google. Realizing that someone could easily deduce where I lived, I quickly changed my settings to private. It was a bit of a buzzkill, and feeling slightly betrayed, I began jogging without my phone. But I got off easy. This past July, users of the Fitbit, a clip-on device that monitors your physical movement, were surprised to learn that after logging their sexual activity (the average person burns 150 to 200 calories per go, so why not count it?), the information was available online, including how long, how vigorous, and how often they got busy.