How well do you know yourself?

Maria has slept 7 hours and 30 minutes, but as her Jawbone bracelet says, she has only been really and deeply resting for 55 minutes. She woke up at half past eight in the morning and went jogging: 5 kilometers and 320 meters, according to her GPS fitness-tracking application, Runkeeper. After a long shower, she has consumed 357 calories for breakfast, that she has immediately registered in FatSecret, the calorie's counter and diet tracker for weight loss application. Then at work, she has received a Klout notification informing that her influence in social networks has increased three points. Maria is a fictitious name, but the numbers that define her could be really believable. 

Jawbone's bracelet UP3 advertisement

The quantified self movement

Everyday we are allowed to get more and more information about ourselves thanks to the progress of sensors, gadgets, applications and data visualization. This phenomenon called "quantified self" is a movement that presents the digitalization of different physical, biological and emotional aspects about our existence. Up to now, this movement has mostly been explored in the healthy field, but its possibilities embrace a lot of different areas. 

The quantified self, also known as lifelogging, is a movement based in the whole quantity of information that is being generated by users thanks to their mobile phones or gadgets, such as digital bracelets or smart watches. There are different applications, websites and platforms that are working with all this massive data, to make it look as clear as possible to their consumers and to achieve an attractive appearance that can persuade the audience. In short, quantified self is self-knowledge through self-tracking with technology.

"Technology allows us to capture our whole life, in video or data", 

explains the director of the Mobile World Capital in Barcelona

Devices and services

For the moment, this self-tracking has a wide variety of different applications and devices, that not only focus its uses on physical aspects but also in emotional and social features, as how is the user feeling, his mood, his sexual life activity, his level of energy and so on. Some examples of them are these activity trackers based in distance walked or run, calorie consumption, and in some cases heartbeat and sleep quality:

• Apple Watch (incorporates fitness tracking and health-oriented capabilities with integration with iOS and other Apple products and services)
• Jawbone Up (steps taken, calories burned, eating habits, sleep quality and sleep cycle vibration)
• Nike + FuelBand (steps taken, calories burned, etc)
• QardioBase (wireless smart scale and body composition analyser)

Picture from QardioBase official website

Regarding to struggles that only girls will understand, the days of using pen and paper to keep track of menstrual cycles are over. The quantified self movement has introduced a huge variety of applications, both iPhone and Android, in order to help girls to control her period tracking. Some of these apps are simple calendars; others have space for tracking body temperature, mood, menstrual symptoms and to make women aware of when they are ovulating and when they have more possibilities to conceive a baby. An example of these kind of apps could be Clue App, one of the many highly rated period tracking apps available due to its multiple uses and also because its attractive and easy to understand design.

Picture from Clue's official website

Self-improvement or digital narcissism?

But besides all these devices and applications are made to increase people's well-being, another vision of the movement could be the damaging of social and interacting activities that provides a world without this type of technology. Some experts say that "quantified self" is rather dangerous than beneficial because it encourages the idea that health is one's responsibility, but this is not but a global and collective concept.

It is also important to talk about the relationship between this technology and its uses, specially as social networks. Everybody loves to share their running records with their followers, but sometimes this can be seen as an insane transformation from a social and interactive world to another one full of egocentric and narcissistic gestures. In addition, and as it can be perceived from a long time ago, this transformation is turning the users into slaves of their own cell phones and smart devices. They just want to lose weight to see their achievement in the app so later they will feel better with themselves.

There is an episode of the famous British television anthology Black Mirror that presents a fictional future world, Nosedive, where everybody is tied to self-tracking technology. The fiction, that focus more in a vicious take of social media, shows how just only one device (a cell phone with multiple self-tracking possibilities) can turn into the center of one person's life. With this gadget, the protagonist, Lacie Pound, an obsessive and technophilic young lady, she can be aware of everything about herself: weight, health, mood, and for sure, how is her influence in social networks going. She can even knowledge how does she have to behave in order to get more and more positive rating from her surroundings. The problem is that there is a moment when her life and self-satisfaction only depends on being popular, pretty, influencer and rich. The fiction defines to the perfection how exciting can be technology and how "cool" you can be seen with it, but the uses that people give to it can drive society into a world full of stupid, useless and nonsense actions. If Black Mirror could be summed up in one sentence it would probably be: "Technology is exciting, but people are awful, and they keep finding the worst ways to apply it"

Black Mirror, Season 3, Nosedive

We are not perfect, we will never be, but with all this gadgets and applications we are trying to approach and get close to this "perfection". As far as we use them for logical reasons, there is no problem in cohabiting with it, but at the moment that we are not being reasonable with it, we'll get lost in it. How well do you know yourself to not let technology come into play with you?