Last Thursday I attended the Quantified Self meetup in San Francisco. It’s become one my favorites since moving to San Francisco this year, I suppose because the combination of “quantified” and “self” matches my passion for understanding the relationship between us and technology.

If you haven’t heard of it, Quantified Self is about the growing phenomena of people measuring things about themselves, often with technological help, and then tracking and analyzing the results. You have already heard of people who record their weight each day in an effort to shed pounds. That’s quantified self. You know athletes that log their performance to see improvement. That’s quantified self. You know people who count how many days they’ve been sober. That too is quantified self.

Of course, people track and record much more. I’ve given two talks at QS meetups, one about my lifelong habit of journaling (I say “journaling” because “diary writing” is somehow connected with young girls writing “Dear diary” at the top of each page.), and the second one about a program I wrote that takes my picture every hour that I’m at my computer. It’s 7:59pm as I write this, so I know my picture will be taken any second. Good thing I’m being productive!

But why? And what does it mean?

I was thinking again tonight about how big thinkers from Freud to McLuhan have considered technology as an extension of our bodies. A car is a extension of walking, a television is an extension of our sight, and a phone an extension of our voice and ears.

But what is tracking? I would say that it’s an extension of our sense of well-being. There are 17 people in the United States who have “congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis”, a disorder where the patient cannot feel pain. By all accounts, it is a horrible condition. Think about how you accidentally bit your tongue when numbed from the dentist. Now imagine that your whole body was like that, and think of all the damage you would do to yourself. Our sense of pain, from stomachaches to ankle sprains, is critically important to our well-being.

We use technology to detect Bad Things that don’t cause us pain: high blood pressure, cholesterol, early-stage tumors, hormonal imbalances. Self-tracking extends this over long time scales. It’s not bad if I miss a day flossing, but it’s bad if I lose the habit.

And it’s not just about pain and Bad Things, but also about reaching goals, self-satisfaction, and making an impact. Watching my improvement in road biking this year (via Strava) has brought me a lot of pleasure (in addition to getting me in shape.) Writing every day has made me at least a faster typist, possibly a better writer, and definitely helped me process the events of my life. Daily meditation has brought more calm, especially through rough spots that I know would otherwise have cast me into depression.

So yes, tracking can be geeky or self-obsessive. But the fact is that it works. Hell, my examples have only been about my health and mental well-being. Consider something like the website Crohnology, where sufferers of Crohns disease are working together, tracking what works and doesn’t work for treating their disease. This is tracking helping not only the tracker, but everyone.

(Photo credit, Mark Smith on Flickr.)

About this time last year I listed in my journal the things that I knew I should do each day. That’s my list above. So as 2012 began, I tried to make those items into daily habits. By summer I was doing better, but frustrated that many had slipped. I could only say that writing and meditating had become true habits. What was the difference? Those were the only two habits where I was tracking my success. Writing with 750words.com, and meditation with Equanimity (and now Insight Timer). What I needed was to track all of my habits.

Serendipitously, it was right then that I heard about an iPhone app which did exactly that. So I became one of the early users of Lift.

Lift is cool because it makes good use of my smartphone addiction. It’s also cool that I get (and can give) feedback to other people trying to develop habits. The data geek in me is excited to see what they will learn about habit adoption (and failure) from thousands of users. For example, here’s a list of top habits from a blog post a few months ago.

I can’t say it’s magically turned all my goals into habits, but it has certainly helped a lot. I’ve added a few more habits along the way, and am carefully considering what to add (or remove) for 2013.

Okay, now to let out my geek…

One feature I’ve been wanting is a way to export and play with my own check-in data. (In lift, you “check-in” to indicate that you’ve done your habit for the day.) So last week I wrote a quick’n'dirty script that will create a simple .csv file of a Lift user’s habits. (Any spreadsheet, like Excel or Libre Office, can read a .csv file.)

If you’re a Lift user and want to export your habits here are the steps:

1. Go to Lift.do and log in. You should be on your user page, listing your habits.
2. Copy the address in your browser. It will look something like http://lift.do/users/5046d263bf6a2411642a
3. Go to lifter.wanderingstan.com and paste the address you copied.
4. Click on the link to download your file! (It may take a few seconds the first time.)

What’s extra-cool is that you can link to this file from a Google spreadsheet. The spreadsheet, and any charts or calculations you made on it, will automatically update with your latest check-ins! For example, here is a spreadsheet with my data.

(Thanks to Joel Longtine for help with the regexp, and motivation to finish.)

EDIT: The code is up on GitHub and awaiting your improvements.
https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifter

Check out my just-released interview with Colin Marshall in his excellent podcast, Notebook on Cities and Culture. You can find it on iTunes (The latest episode, episode S2E12) or Notebook on Cities and Culture’s feed. Our conversation was lively and ranged widely, but over my favorite things! He summarized our conversation thus:

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco’s Mission at the Noisebridge hacker space withStan James, founder of Lijit, creator of the first browser-based massively multiplayer games, co-host of the 7th Kingdom podcast, and author of a book in progress on technology and our minds. They discuss Noisebridge itself and its almost Utopian qualities; how the supernormal stimuli of cat videos create addiction; how his early multiplayer games could created addiction; San Francisco’s position as the American city to be in for those with technological interests, not exclusively technological interests; the optimal Mission-style burrito ordering strategy; how we’ve left the concept of immersion in virtual reality behind in favor of always being at least a little bit on the internet, and how we can see it in the ways we navigate and even date; stepping outside our reactions to new technological developments by going back to Plato; parental disregard for the protocol of Skype calling; his life in Berlin, another city where people go to do projects and make things; how and why he became “Wandering Stan,” and the importance he’s found of digging into others’ lives when he’s in actual places; whether younger so-called “digital natives” can better handle technological addictiveness; how wide a swath of the human experience San Francisco offers; how he discovered the difference between his engaged-in-a-project face and his dead-eyed Reddit-browsing face; and how Avril Lavigne reached Nepal before she reached him.

Source: Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E12: Good Old Shareware with Stan James

I am crazy excited to announce the launch of a new podcast hosted by myself and my friend Jason Lange. I met Jason while founding Lijit in Boulder, and we would always have the best talks; about technology, where things are going, how it affects our lives, and where things are going. Together we know some of the most interesting and active people in the worlds of internet, film, mindfulness, personal development, and philosophy. So it just made sense when Jason emailed me and said, “Why don’t we do a podcast, like our old talks, but bringing in these amazing friends, and publishing it for the world?”

So was born The 7th Kingdom.

What does the name mean? Well, we explain it in our first podcast.

Here’s what you do:

• Subscribe on iTunes
• Like us on Facebook
• Visit our web site for additional news and links

Thanks for joining us on this trip. It’s going to be a lot of fun!

The Treachery of Images, a painting by René Magritte from 1928. The text reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” — “This is not a pipe.

The artist later explained, ”The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!”

Mass Media,  Recordable Media, Old Media, New Media, and now Social Media.

But what is media?

The core idea is that of being in between. A medium T-shirt is between small and large. Someone who communicates between you and dead people is called a medium. A music CD is the connection between the band and you. A book is the medium between you and the author. More fundamentally, media is bridge that connects you to a “world”. In the case of a photograph, you are experiencing the material world, but with a media intermediary.

This connection is not necessarily to the real world, as with a Harry Potter book, a Star Wars film, or any work of fiction. Or someone writing about a blue tree. When an aborigine reads animal tracks in the dirt, are the tracks media? Or does media have to be intensional?

It seems that we only call things media that are human-created. But what about art by animals, like Boon Me the painting elephant? You could argue that she was simply trained by humans to follow instructions. But then we get into deep philosophical waters!

More thoughts on media to come.

I’ve been preoccupied with this question:

Is silicon valley destroying the world? Is what we do morally destitute?

We create these things that are incredibly engaging. And yes they connect people, and yes they democratize publishing, and yes they do some amazing things.

But they also disract us–constantly. We have the notifications. WordPress is about to launch notifications, and I have this moral dilemma. It’s such a good feature; you can moderate your comments from it, it’s really slick. But at the same time, we’re now going to be pinging people when they should be having conversation with a loved one, or they should be thinking about something.

And that’s why showers and the opera work, because they force you to have a little space. And space is where those special thoughts — real ideas, things you are going to spend the rest of your life doing — are going to come from.

They’re not going to come when your’e in that loop: Gmail, Facebook, Techmeme, Twitter, etc. You can do that all day.

At this point the interviewer abruptly shifted the conversation to he likes living in New York. A pity.

Of course WordPress will release the notifications feature. I wonder how many other tech people have harbored such doubts, and if any have actually held back out of concern for the public good. Of course, we will never know about these, since you only hear about what is created — not what is held back!

I wonder if addictive technology — games, notifications, tweets, whatever — may one day acquire the social stigma of older addictions like gambling, drugs, and alcohol?

Here is the video, skipped to the relevant portion of his interview:

Facebook and Google are the yin and yang of our online selves.

With Google, we share the mundane details of our life, and our dark secrets. Google knows you searched for paper towel reviews, knows your’re thinking of buying a new car, knows your love of boy bands, knows far too much about that purple rash, and probably knows your sexual fantasies. It knows all this, but can only guess guess your age, guess your gender, guess your city, and may not even know your name.

On the other hand, Facebook knows your name, gender, age, city, relationship status and more. You told it! And you are kind enough to give updates when any of these change. But Facebook knows few secrets–other than the inordinate amount of time you spend on that one profile. Rather, Facebook is the curated “You” that you aspire to be, the “You” that you want the world to see. No purple rashes here! Leonard Cohen instead of Backstreet Boys. No fantasies, instead “Interested in: Women”.

Both Google and Facebook are in the business of delivering ads, and advertisers want to choose the type of people they reach. Google has had the upper hand here, since paper-towel-buying and car-wanting people are easy to advertise to. But in the long run, Facebook’s asset is to own your online persona. I predict this asset will be worth more than advertising revenue.

The yin envies the yang’s profitability, and the yang invests millions to create its own yin.

I’ll write full write-up soon, but here’s my favorite gem so far. (Thanks to Brad White for brainstorming the idea with me.) Can you tell what the pictures are showing?

 
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Video of my dad explaining his scanning project:

Presenting at the Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2011:

See The Future of Retrospective for more thoughts on family archiving.

In contrast, the iPad now features a “Retina Display,” so named because the pixels are so small that the human eye can no longer see individual pixles. Gizmodo recently pointed out that a single icon of on the new iPod contains more pixels than on the entire screen of the original Macintosh Computer.

(Credit: Gizmoto)

Pixels are the primary connection from machine to human. By my estimates, I spend nearly half of all open-eye hours looking at pixels. They are in our phones, televisions, tablets, computers, and even billboards. I ate a restaurant in New York where all the menu’s were iPads. Pixels are bleeding into every corner of our visual life.

A pixel is a deeply human artifact. Human eyes perceive the world through cells tuned to red, green, and blue light. Pixels are made of three filters, for red, green, and blue light. Most mammals see only blue and green. Sparrows see red, green, blue, and ultraviolet — and thus would be unimpressed with your new HDTV, no matter how big.

Pixels have come to resemble the eyes they are to seen by.  Here is a human retina, with cells colored to their sensitivity:

Pixels in a screen, similarly magnified:

Pixels have been crafted to fit our eyes just as gloves fit our hands, technology shaped by the shapes of our bodies.

More often than not, pixels to win the contest of “most interesting thing in the room.” If you’ve ever tried to hold a conversation in a room with TV on, you know how hard it is to resist the pull of a screen. And now with pixels in our pockets, even the beautiful face of a dinner companion may lose out. Pixels are shapeshifters that know what we can’t resist!

Counting world totals for televisions, computers, and phones, I calculate that there are about 1,400,000,000,000,000 pixels in the world today. That’s about 200,00 for every living person.

Paradoxically, just about the time pixels will have reached every nook and cranny in the world, we won’t need them “out there” anymore! Google recently announced Google Glass, a pair of glasses with a small screen floating directly in front of the user’s eye. The machine-to-human interface just got a lot cozier.

Pixels in your face.

And if that’s not close enough Dr. Babak Parviz is developing ways to put pixels on contact lenses. He estimates they will be available in about ten years.

(Photo: University of Washington)

Pixels are part of our lives. Like me, much of your feelings in life come to you via pixels. The email from your friend, the video call with a loved one, the numbers of your bank balance, the pictures of that magically happy time from last summer. Pixels are at the center of human innovation at the moment, winning out over old-school technology like rockets to the moon.  Pixels give us great powers, beyond even the gods of our fairy tales. May we learn to use them responsibly!

Links:

• “90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles:” http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-staring-at-glowing,2747/
• Wonderful RadioLab podcast on colors, in humans and other animals: http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/
• Estimation of number of pixels: http://www.quora.com/Displays/How-many-pixels-are-there-in-the-world?__snids__=38707491
• Pixels on contact lens: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/augmented-reality-in-a-contact-lens/0

More information and comments are at the Quantified Self Blog.