Quantified Self, Self-tracking, and Self-awareness: What are the advantage and disadvantage of self-tracking from a psychological perspective?
Self-tracking devices are getting more notice from people nowadays. More and more people get their Quantified Self, which is self-knowledge, through self-tracking from wearable devices. Until now, people’s impression and opinions about it are still pretty positive. However, even considering the privacy issues between the individual and device companies, the possibilities of the biased statistical outcomes, and any other negatives, the behavior of gathering QS data encourages people to understand themselves more and acquire more self-awareness which is psychologically profitable to individual’s development.
Quantified Self and Self-tracking
Nowadays, more and more people are using self-tracking devices and mobile applications such as Fitbit, Garmin, and Nike+ to monitor, collect and analyze their fitness. Although the concept of self-tracking, lifelogging or body-hacking has been existing for centuries, the Quantified Self, as a label of “a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self-knowledge through self-tracking” was just proposed by Wired Magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in 2007.
For many years, people have been collecting different sorts of self-tracking data, both quantitative and qualitative, served and displayed in varied ways from professional medical research to a more contemporary trend of data visualization. For example, Santorio Santorio, also called Sanctorius of Padua, a Venetian physiologist, physician, professor, is one of the earliest documented examples of quantified self-tracking. He recorded the weight of what he ate and drank, as well as his urine and feces for thirty years to study people’s metabolism in the 16th century.
Nicholas Felton as an infographic designer, gathered every minute of his life from his own memory, calendar, photos, and Last.fm data and translated this quotidian data into artistic charts. He then published them as Personal Annual Reports starting in 2005 until 2014. Although his aim was not only analytical but also aesthetic, his playing of recording, analyzing and visualizing self-quantification was a notable specimen of individual collecting personal data and evaluating self before QS, the term came out.
The principal formula for the Quantified Self is to collect and analyze data that, for the most part, is automatically assembled by wearable devices with the new technologies nowadays. That is to say, the essential element differentiating QS from any other previous self-measurement is that contemporary “quantified self” accentuates the interference of technology which shapes the natural world, including the human body with new order and understanding. Because the features of being small and cheap allow the new technologies to be on smartphones or watches, quantitative methods that used to exist in science and business are able to be brought to the personal sphere now. On top of that, in the era of big data, despite QS beginning from self-tracking, there is a larger picture of gathering the shared data from each device and working collaboratively to optimize the analytical suggestions generated by the system.
The mechanism of QS is a cycle of examination, interpretation, and improvement of people’s life toward a higher quality self. Even though the gathered data is quantitative, it is often qualitative that the way people explain and utilize the data. Swan (2013) claimed that there may be little purpose to self-tracking if there is no feedback loop connecting it back to real-life problem solving and behavior change. The ultimate goal of self-tracking would still be to produce meaningful insights from the obtained data and provoke people to take actions and change their behaviors. Companies which provide service analyzing personal self-tracking data do not usually give users the raw data collected from their devices but visualize it into readable charts or deliver descriptions derived from statistical methodology because people are better at thinking in narratives.
While QS, considered as self-tracking 1.0, already covered a variety of areas, for instance, weight, steps walked, sleep quality, and locations, which are basic quantitative facts and has qualitative impacts, self-tracking 2.0 is tracking qualitative phenomena such as mood, emotion, and happiness more directly. People can either enter qualitative descriptions or report numbers where a qualitative phenomenon has been mapped on a quantitative scale to establish the qualitative data(e.g., my mood today is 4 out of 5). Since QS has already influenced people’s life quality, self-tracking 2.0 might have more potential for people.
Self-tracking and Self-awareness
Since Wolf and Kelly considered the idea of the Quantified Self is beneficial to people, they founded a California-based company, Quantified Self Lab, to encourage more people to discover themselves by holding international conferences, meetings and providing a community worldwide for self-tracking users to share and exchange the information about self-tracking knowledge and tools.
Because through the practice of self-tracking, people are also practicing a way to get more self-awareness which has an advantage to people’s mental health, self-tracking might be of more importance than people think on the mental side.
Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. Self-awareness theory, first proposed by psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wichlund’s (1972) in their landmark book A Theory of Objective Self-awareness, states “when we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values. We become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves.” In Psychologist Daniel Goleman’s best-selling book Emotional Intelligence, he has come out with a more popular explanation of self-awareness as “knowing one’s internal states, preference, resources, and intuitions.” Since self-awareness is not only the process of noting people’s self but also monitoring their inner world, while people do more actions on exploring themselves, they acquire more self-awareness and have more possibility to maintain their mental health. Based on what Daniel Goleman mentioned in his book, self-awareness is the keystone to emotional intelligence. When people start thinking about their behaviors, they will start thinking about their motivation and emotions behind the event itself. Subsequently, people may have begun trying to manage themselves, their every movement or life.
However, while people have more self-awareness, people’s response toward the discovery would get more emotional. In spite of the significant positive correlation between the level of self-awareness and psychological health, as long as people bring judgments into the procedure of self-awareness, the whole system may not work as it should be. While people gradually obtain a complete image of themselves, some people would compare themselves with the external world, alter their behaviors and encounter fulfillment or dissatisfaction. For example, some people adjust their diet depending on their weight from self-tracking data but cannot always get what they have been expected. In addition, while sensing more self-awareness, people’s various emotional states are intensified. They show stronger emotional feedback after succeeding or failing to meet the set standard. That is to say, those people who already feel anxiety or disappointment may feel more amplified negative emotional feedback from the data.
Nevertheless, in fact, most of the time people do not have conscious of what they are doing or how they are feeling. While people lack self-awareness, self-tracking can be seen as an advantageous concept that effectively supports people to start monitoring and understanding themselves. Many people do self-tracking now because they have been willing to improve their life quality for a long time within which sleep quality is a popular option. Besides, current advanced technologies are more accessible for people to start systematically watching and taking care of themselves. From the perspective of the type of data, compare to self-tracking 1.0, people’s active observation of their emotion in self-tracking 2.0 may speed up the process of self-awareness since they will tend to consciously try to understand their psychological condition while entering the answer of their mood into the system.
Conclusion
“’QSers’ don’t just self-track; they also interrogate the experiences, methods, and meanings of their self-tracking practices, and of self-tracking practices generally.” (Boesel 2013)
For contemporary self-tracking, there are still a lot of room for people to discuss, but from the aspect of encouraging people to get self-awareness, its advantages are inevitable. The action of doing self-tracking is like cultivating a habit of being more self-aware. The collected data and the analyzed results have potential being wrong or arouse too many negative emotions. Whichever kind of self-tracking data we would like to trace to get a bigger image of ourselves, going extreme will always be a bad idea. However, the behavior itself of trying to understand ourselves is more significant than the data derived from the behavior.
References
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