Today Apple unveiled its latest technological creation, the Apple Watch, a wearable computer that tracks not only time but your every step, heartbeat, and calorie. With their latest product, Apple contributes to the growing availability of devices and apps that track and record our activities and biostatistics such as Fitbit, Basis, and My Fitness Pal. Given Apple's commercial influence, the Apple Watch may well turn the nascent Quantified Self (QS) movement into a cultural mainstay delivering “self knowledge through numbers.”
Most QS practices track health-related activities such as calorie intake, exercise, and sleep patterns, but they are increasingly used to document and track experiences of grief, exploration, and productivity. And tracking apps and devices are even making their way unexpected areas of life experience. Attempts to measure the soul, data point by data point, for example, are increasingly common. Just last January a Menlo Park pastor teamed up with a University of Connecticut sociologist to create SoulPulse, which, as Casey N. Cep explains, is a
a technology project that captures real-time data on the spirituality of Americans. SoulPulse attempts to quantify the soul, an unbodied version of what FitBit, the exercise-tracking device, has done for the body. After filling in a brief intake survey on your age, race, ethnicity, education, income, and religious affiliation, SoulPulse contacts you twice a day with questions about your physical health, spiritual disciplines, and religious experiences. Each of the surveys takes less than five minutes to complete.
SoulPulse encourages users to learn about their "spirituality" through the power of big data and digital automation. This may sound crazy, but what's the difference between tracking your daily prayer life with an app and doing so with another set of repeatable instructions, such as the Benedictine Rule and its set of daily readings and reminders to ponder God?
Many aspects of the QS movement are anything but new. Western cultures have long maintained practices that document behaviors and experiences in order to discipline ourselves. Capitalism and quantifying the self have been intimately linked for some time. Early accounting practices allowed businessmen to understand the consequences of their behavior so that it could be modified in the future. Merchants developed account logs that allowed them to track the results of their business transactions and to modify them in the future. Perhaps they had purchased too much grain and it spoiled before it could be sold. In the following year, the same merchant could alter his practice based on this cataloged information. And Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management theories relied on precise measurements of workers' efficiency.
And more in the tradition of St. Benedict, people have long kept track of their spiritual lives. Benjamin Franklin dutifully recorded his success in adhering to a list of thirteen virtues each day. Diaries and journals have long been witness not just to bad poetry but to detailed lists of eating and sleeping habits. Weight Watchers and its point system, founded in 1963, turned such practices into a business.
Despite such similarities, tracking devices such as Apple Watch are not the same as eighteenth-century diaries. The former have the potential to revolutionize the health sector and facilitate better care, but what happens when they don't just give away our desires on Facebook (I like this!) but open up a one-way data stream on our bodies? How long will it take for all that personal data to make its way to our insurance companies? (The now-common annual biometric screenings will seem quaint by comparison.)
Self-reflection and personal development are broad cultural values. But what happens to us when we focus on aspects of ourselves that are easily recorded and converted into numbers? QS enthusiasts advocate for the expansion of tracking devices from the private sphere into the work environment, where they might provide insights on employee selection, promotion, and productivity. How will tracking social and personal behavior, such as how many times one smiles during the day, alter work environments and those who inhabit them?
Digital practices and techniques for tracking and disciplining the self are different from the analogue and print predecessors for several reasons. First, what they can track has expanded. Benjamin Franklin most likely didn't know the rate of his perspiration. Second, the precision with which data is measured and recorded is continually increasing. Similarly, tracking devices and apps are increasingly frictionless: They do their job with minimal interruption and effort on the part of the user. Finally, the digital format of the data represents a marked difference from records of the past. Many of these tracking devices easily connect to apps and programs that analyze the data, dictating to the individual a pre-programmed assessment of success or failure. The digital nature of the information also makes it easily available and transferable.
These new developments and the manufacture and dissemination of these technologies and apps through popular and trusted brands such as Apple are likely to expand the degree to which individuals come to imagine themselves, their bodies, and their habits through and as numbers. As we continue into our quantified future, will these new digital practice alter what will means to be a good person, a successful person, or an efficient person? Will be we able to juke the numbers? Just because the technology is intended to track behavior and facilitate modification of that behavior doesn't mean that it won't be put to other purposes. What will we make of our new digital tracking practices and the self that we come to know through numbers?
Claire Maiers is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia.