Stories of Data-Driven Lives
Does data drive your life? For some people, measuring and tracking themselves is a self-exploration process. Many stories can be found at The Quantified Self (where I am a blogger).
One of the founders of Quantified Self, Gary Wolf of WIRED Magazine, just wrote this article in the New York Times Magazine called The Data-Driven Life. CureTogether is mentioned twice in the article – yay! Here is an excerpt:
Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.
What could you learn by incorporating more data into your life?
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.





July 26th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
I think this work is important, and Gary’s piece was seminal. These ideas generalize into a wider life-as-experiment perspective, and I’d like to link to my response and outline of how it all might fit together here: The Experiment-Driven Life (http://www.matthewcornell.org/2010/06/the-experiment-driven-life.html). Great stuff!