The Body-data Craze
A．Welcome to my biography, 2013-style. It includes more data points than it possibly could have 20 years ago. And it’s part of a national obsession of a people who, literally, number our days. According to a recent nationwide survey for Pew Research Center Internet ＆ American Life Project, 7 out of 10 people self-track regularly-using everything from human memory to a memory stick-some aspect of health for themselves or for someone else. Among the 3,000 s questioned, the most popular things to monitor were weight and diet. A third of the people surveyed also track more complicated elements of their health, from blood pressure to sleep to blood sugar.
B．While many of them keep this information "in their heads", a full 50 percent actually keep a written record of the data either using technology or on paper. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, in 2012 the U.S. sports and fitness category was a ＄70 billion business; and earlier this year, market firm ABI released a report that estimated that 485 million wearable computing devices-like smart watches and smart glasses-will be shipped annually by 2018. Privately owned "human-centered wearable technology" company Jawbone is valued at a billion dollars, and perhaps more.
C．What do people count in their everyday lives True believers in the power of measurement go one step further-tracking every bite or step, but also sharing what they’ve learned with others. A male friend sends his body mass index from his gym scale to the cloud. A cousin of mine counts her steps on a pedometer (步程计) and posts them on Facebook. People like New York Times reporter Brian Stelter, who wrote in his article Tall Tales, Truth and My Twitter Diet, that he could not diet alone, so he "decided to use Twitter. I thought it would make me more accountable, because I could record everything I ate instantly."
D．If our life stories used to be reducible to a shoebox full of old photographs, now we will remember ourselves by Fithit at the gym. Meanwhile, a shoe sensor called Amiigo, a wristband device called Basis, indoorenvironment monitoring systems, Jawbone’s UP for sleep and fitness and Google Glass are all available on the sales site Groupon.
E．We collect this information on the pretext of health, self-knowledge organization, or efficiency. We believe we need to know it so that we can better ourselves. But what happens if the upsides have downsides to match What happens if we can’t stop ourselves from counting on our endless digital abacuses (算盘) And are we giving up some of the shreds of privacy we have left by endlessly recording ourselves and sending it to the cloud
F．It’s true that some of this data may be useful. If you track your food consumption and digestion, seeing the numbers may inspire you to eat better. If you track your blood sugar, you may maintain better control of it. A person who uses Asthmapolis, a wireless sensor in an asthma (哮喘) inhaler that records the GPS of a person experiencing an attack or shortness of breath could be recording details of the attack that would help all of us learn what nearby plants or chemicals in the air contributed to the attack.
G．"Self-quantifiers absolutely fit into big data," says Kenneth Cukier, author of Big Data, an optimistic book about today’s gathering, storage, and ysis of information on a massive scale. "Big data is not just about size-it’s about doing new things with data. We are collecting material about ourselves-respiration or heart rate-that we never collected before and crunching the numbers."
H．The idea is that self-quantifying is a way of being an expert on yourself, at a time when studies can tell you about percentages and probability for everything from drug effectiveness to your vote, but cannot tell you about you in particular. For Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and author of Who Owns the Future, it can be societally productive when normal people are forced "to act like scientists, challenging their biases," and clearing their perceptions. Also, having been "blind to our own insides," Lanier says, he sees the value of "seeing in real time some things that go on in my body. Now I am in my 50s, I am just starting to learn how to use my own body."
I．"Quantifying is mostly a way to take care of ourselves," Cukier says. "In the past, experts did vast studies in lab hospitals to discover this, but now we can use one-hundred-dollar UP bands." For Cukier, the dark side of QS is: hypochondria (疑病症). If people are constantly monitoring themselves, they may imagine they are encountering the onset of a disease when their symptoms are really "statistical noise," as Cukier puts it.
J．QS-ers Honeywell and Greenhall both questioned why achieving a low body weight is the desired outcome of dozens of new sensors now on the market. That’s not to say it doesn’t work: thanks to QS, Greenhall says she lost 40 pounds over two years. Honeywell, on the other hand, gets too thin when she gets stressed. "I’d like to tell all of these companies that offer ways to measure yourself, that consumers should have the option to turn off all the diet talk," said Honeywell. "I’d love Fitbit to have an option to keep your weight above a certain amount as well as below." "Calories are so emotionally loaded for people with eating disorders," said Greenhall.
K．It’s possible that all this quantification might be able to help with some sorts of eating and other disorders, but the reverse is also possible: after all, obsessive bodily measurement can be a fundamental symptom of anorexia (厌食) or bulimia (贪食). Diana Freed, a therapist specializing in eating disorders, wrote last year about the way "the drastic increase of apps that obsessively quantify eating and fitness.., have radically transformed the way anorexia afflicts patients."
L．Might all of these numbers ually be used against all self-quantifiers Sure, the most serious QS-ers were autonomous imaginative geeks, quantifying from the bottom up. But their employers might be quantifying them as well. "The invasion of privacy is an issue," says Lanier. "A company in Britain has asked its workers to wear wearable computing to monitor how healthfully they are living: this seems to be crazy. In the American context, when you use self-quantifying stuff to improve your health you are also sending this information to data aggregators and someone might one day deny your insurance because of it."
M．This is far from hypothetical: three years ago, the Nielsen company tried to go in and get health information from mentally ill people posting on a site’s private online forum. "Even if you are quantifying your own data, if it goes through the cloud service, you may be exploited," says Lanier. "You are yourself vulnerable." If you join all this DIY Big Data with the other data out there-not only all of our emails and Google searches, but also the sensors in the water system, in medical implants, in stoplight cameras and sound-activated street gunshot detectors-there’s so much of it that one security expert, Bruce Schneier, recently suggested that "the Internet is being monitored."
N．As Lanier puts it, "There are two ers of self-quantifying: one is compromising privacy and the other is that its participants can narrow themselves. Its extreme adherents hyperconcentrate on certain kinds of numbers about themselves, and it can make them a little mare robotic than other people. "It may be too soon to know exactly how and what QS has transformed. Our memories were once defined a wooden childhood toy or a grainy picture of a lost lover, a graduation dress or a passionate postcard.
O．In the future, that record could be dominated by our sleep patterns or the record of our respiration. "Instead of saving a high school football jersey will we remember our pulse" Cukier wonders. We were both entirely sure, though, that quantifying is the mode of our time. "QS is not odd, "says Cukier. "Today, we call it Quantified Self: tomorrow we are going to call it health care. In the future quantifying ourselves is not going to be done by some people but by all people.\
The Body-data CrazeIt’s probable that all the people around the whole world will count about themselves in the future.