What happens when you track everything about yourself?

Jordan How much do you know about your health that you didn’t know a decade ago? And I don’t mean to in terms of how are you feeling or are you getting over a cold? You have allergies no, I mean specifically. What do you know? How many steps did you take yesterday? What was your resting heart rate while you were taking them? What about as you slept last night? How long did you sleep last night? How much of that was REM sleep? You might not know all these things yourself, but a lot of us do. This is all thanks, of course, to connected wearable devices like Fitbit’s, Apple Watches, Oura Rings. But is knowing that good for us? Does it help us make better decisions? Do I need to worry because my heart rate was racing while I slept for a few minutes in the middle of the night? What if my V02 max is down? If your blood oxygen is a little low, should you call your doctor? How much about ourselves and our lives do we really need to quantify in detail? And what do we gain and lose when we do it?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is Interconnected on The Big Story, Part Three: the Quantified Self. Natasha Schull is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her second book, Keeping Track, explores the relationship between an individual self and personal data by looking at the advance of digital data gathering techniques like you guessed it, wearable fitness devices. Hello, Natasha.

Natasha Schull Hi. How are you doing?

Jordan I’m doing really well. Thank you for joining us today.

Natasha Schull No problem.

Jordan Just to give our listeners some context, maybe can you explain what is the Quantified Self movement?

Natasha Schull First of all, the Quantified Self group does not like to be called movement.

Jordan Really?

Natasha Schull Yes, they’re a community. They hold fiercely to that characterization. Rather than movement, which has more the thrust of a trend or something political. They are a collective or a community of individuals who come together to share with each other, following a very simple formula. They get together and they share what’s called show and tells with each other. And in the show and tells, they answer three questions what did I track? How did I track it? And what did I learn? And some people use pen and paper, some people use photographs. The majority of people in the Quantified Self do use some kind of quantitative metric to track one or more variables.

It’s a little different than people who sort of track to build up an archive of memories because it’s usually goal oriented. You want to figure something out about yourself with the aid of whether it’s wearable devices or certain kinds of data that you gather and track. So you might want to understand whether your symptoms that your experience has to do with the change in your diet, or breaking up with your boyfriend, or switching where you park in the morning when you go to work, things like this. It can be incredibly mundane. It can also seem far more significant, like tracking Parkinson’s symptoms and really anything under the sun that you think of.

Jordan You mentioned some health stuff there, but you also mentioned a number of things that may not have to do with at least the typical stuff that I think our listeners think of when we talk about wearables. So how new is this community? Does it predate the Oura rings, Fitbits, et cetera?

Natasha Schull I would say that if you want to be really broad about what the Quantified Self Group is doing right, and just human beings seeking self knowledge by tracking themselves, you can go way back to the ancient Greeks. You can find so many instances of keeping track and logging. We have Benjamin Franklin, who had a special little tablet that he used with 13 variables that he would track, including his sleep and his alcohol consumption and meat and how honest he was, how modest he was. So people have long used technology, quote unquote, in that case, a tablet and a pencil and a system to track themselves. But with the rise of digital technology, personal computing and the mobile phone especially, I believe, the 2007 version, that really was a watershed for this kind of thing.

Jordan Why?

Natasha Schull Because it was suddenly at our fingertips. Stuff that you formerly had to do in the laboratory with the team of scientists over a great period of time could be done by pulling your phone out of your pocket, opening an app and setting it to go. All of a sudden, we can be the sort of scientists of ourselves in a way. And so you saw a group of people, some of them had connections to Wired magazine. Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf among them, were considered the two founders of the group, and they met in living rooms. Kevin Kelly in San Francisco, 2008, I believe.

And that was really the first meeting of what would become the Quantified Self community. And then it really just took off very organic, ground up kind of growth to the Quantified Self community. It popped up in different cities abroad and around the states, usually attracting educated white men, right? But certainly not to the exclusion of women, other races and cultures, et cetera. But it does tend to fit that stereotype of the geek, right? The geek who is super motivated and tracking themselves.

Jordan Early adopters, I believe we call them.

Natasha Schull That’s one way to call them, yes.

Jordan It’s become commonplace for some people at least, to, as you put it, keep tabs on some mundane things. I want to know if I’m hitting my steps or if my heart rate is going up or down or whatever. Every time we talk about a kind of technology, there’s always people pushing it further and further, what does the cutting edge technology of the Quantified Self community look like?

Natasha Schull You know, the Quantified Self community, I wouldn’t say that it has a cutting edge sort of trend to it because some of the most elegant, beautiful, meaningful and revealing tracking projects can be done using tools we’ve had around for a long time. In fact, there’s a real appreciation for simplicity. I think what you’re talking about is more when the so-called quantrepreneurs start showing up. And they may not be there to share their own data and learn about themselves, but they want to take this formula to market.

And so part of what I did in my research was after I had attended Quantified Self meetings for a while, I then started following the quantrepreneurs to their trade shows like the annual Consumer Electronics Show. And there you see these kind of cutting edge visions that are again, very often profit driven. What do those look like? Well, it really depends what kind of tracking you’re talking about. Like, are you talking about attention tracking? In that case, you might find things that have first percolated at the MIT Media Lab, pair of glasses. That is also a brain interface that will buzz on your head when it senses algorithmically that you have ceased to pay attention in class or while you’re driving. Then you can imagine the different applications that could be brought into factories or used by students. It can just be a simple risk. Watch that buzzes you at different times to remind you to move as many of these gadgets do.

So really it’s hard to say that this whole space we’re talking about is one thing. There are actually very contradictory logics at play. It’s also new. You may have gadgets sitting next to each other on the shelves of some big box store and they’re both falling under Quantified Self or self tracking, but they’re actually operating with very different understandings of what’s the role of the person or the technology. So I’ve just been wandering around in that domain trying to make sense of it all. And what I have found is that as Quantified Self has moved out of this very geeky domain of Quantified Self and I don’t say that in a negative way, but people who are really motivated to persistently gather knowledge about themselves so as to affect some kind of insight or self transformation, which is certainly a good thing, but not everybody can stick with that. So as people started taking that formula to market, it didn’t always work. And so every year when I went back to the next Consumer Electronics Show, I would find new data within showing people are just putting these things away in the drawer, they’re not using them.

So ironically, we’ve seen a deep quantification. Like if I was to characterize the general trend of the market in the kinds of gadgets that have emerged out of Quantified Self spirit, one of the things I’ve seen is a de-quantification. And the way that this growing industry and wearable technology is reacting to that consumer sentiment. Like, I am just overloaded with data. And I understand that I can drill down into my data in certain moments, but a lot of the time, the idea of doing it every day depletes me. And I would just like something to be helping me in the background, whether it’s buzzing me and saying, oh, you’ve got to go pick up your daughter now, it’s time to drink water. One of the problems that you run into if you’re trying to monetize the Quantified Self formula is that it might be that the best way to go about things is to have an insight and learn something and then move on with your life. Or maybe you engage in a certain tracking practice once a month or once a year when you need a refresher, and the rest of the time you don’t, you put it aside.

However, what these companies have to do, that doesn’t work for them, that’s not a good monetization formula that even if it works best by being intermittent or happening as a sort of short module that you put away the rest of the time, they can’t do that, right? They’ve got to also create a technology that is always on. So this “always on” kind of mentality, I call it Data for Life. Like the idea that you need to be exhaustively capturing data all the time. And I feel like in many ways that too is a formula for failure because I think that always on imperative can exhaust people, right? So they both want you to wear it all the time, but then wearing it all the time, charging it all the time, focusing on it gets to be a drag for people and then they just put it away all together. So I do think that we’re going to see new iterations of tracking devices that maybe are a little bit more episodic or as needed, rather than always on, which is a challenge.

Jordan What kind of opportunities are there, especially in a field like health care, which ten years ago, if we went to our doctors, we would be describing symptoms that we had and what we think may have preceded them or may not have, and the doctor would take your vitals in that moment. Now, depending on if and what tech you’re using, you can go to the doctor, and here’s my heart rate and exercise for the last three months. What’s the next step to that and what opportunities does it create?

Natasha Schull Well, you ask what’s the next step to that? But I don’t know that the medical system is even quite on board with that yet. A lot of medical people go to these conferences and I talked and interview them, and they’re not all that pleased with this craze in self tracking. They see a lot of it as inaccurate and they are correct that a lot of this has yet to gain the kind of accuracy that a medical grade, far more expensive device would have. We do see some advances where consumer grade devices are shockingly accurate, but even then, doctors are a little bit annoyed by it. They’re annoyed by patients coming to them and bringing their data and their Excel spreadsheets. There’s a sort of like medical industry eye role, like, stop bothering you with your data and let me just be your doctor. And I think a lot of that is unfair, that there actually can be really important things that one detects on their own kind of detective hunt to resolve symptoms or notice things.

Jordan How reliable is the data that we get from our Apple Watches and Fitbits? Now, the one I have on my wrist right now can claim to measure my blood oxygen level, which obviously can be a sign of COVID if I have it. And there was a lot of this during the pandemic. You say doctors are skeptical. Do we know how accurate it is?

Natasha Schull That question assumes that we can make a blanket statement about all these things. And it’s such a vast difference. Something like the Oura Ring has really honed its particular algorithms for things like resting heart rate, blood oxygen levels. And you saw a new kind of respect to some degree come during the COVID pandemic, which is still ongoing, and they have this sort of retroactive data to prove it. Look, it knew that I had COVID, the signal was there before I took the test, and then the test just confirmed it. The Oura Ring is not the only one. There’s the Whoop. And there’s a whole range they can pick up on these things. But then you look at things like step trackers, and many devices will be operating with quite different ways of measuring that, like using accelerometers in relation to where you are in space and your distance. Some of them can’t count steps going up, and often what they’re measuring is a sort of proxy. They’re not actually measuring a step and another step and another step.

How many steps should we be taking anyway? Is this 10,000 steps even accurate? It’s quite random. There’s a whole interesting history to that that I believe came out of an advertising campaign. But really, there’s nothing magical about 10,000 steps. In fact, there was recently a study that was done showing that the healthiest number of steps is maybe 7000 to 8000 a day, if you’re going to go that route. There is ambiguity all around. I mean, some people would say that accuracy isn’t the issue. These devices and modes of thinking about oneself just keep you tuned in, that it’s sort of the journey, not the destination. It’s being aware that wearing a ring or wristwatch or even remembering to charge. It compels you to be more self attentive. Others would say that all this stuff, including GPS on our phones is allowing us to no longer know how to read a map or orient ourselves, and that we’re actually losing our orientation to the world. So you’ve got sort of both ways of looking at it which are radically different.

Jordan One of the things we’re really trying to answer as we look at these episodes is how are these things actually changing us and changing how we behave? And while I’m sure there have always been people who are utterly fascinated by tracking with any means their day to day lives and changes in them, what is it doing to us to just have more data than we ever could have thought possible about the inner workings of our own bodies and fitness than we ever had before? And again, when I go and look at the stats and my fitness trackers, there are always things that I’d never even considered and didn’t realize it was tracking, like V02 max. I have no idea if that’s reliable, but now apparently I know what mine is and maybe I should be worried about it. How does it impact us to have this level of data so readily available?

Natasha Schull So, once again, I can give a kind of two sided answer to that, that for some people, this is not the most healthy, hyper attention to oneself. You know, it’s that sort of we’re all somewhere on the spectrum of hypochondria. And for those who are further along that spectrum, that this is just going to be, you know, people are going to be increasing their anxiety about themselves when they don’t need to, right? And then for other people, it’s going to reduce their anxiety. They put this thing on, they feel like something is taking care of them in some way. They’re not obsessing over the numbers, and they have a different relationship to it.

So once again, these machines don’t come into humanity in a monolithic way. If anything, what they do is they expose the vast differences among us. I am less concerned as a cultural anthropologist with what they are doing to us and whether they are accurate or not. And those kinds of questions. I’m more interested in taking them as some kind of a signal or symptom, if you want to put it in those terms, of where we’re at in our culture and why at this moment are we also eager to have this kind of help? Why are we all so eager to embrace the specific promises that this kind of quantifying wearable technology is offering us? And I think it has a lot to do actually, with feeling really overwhelmed at this moment with all the technology that pervades our mundane everyday life. In so many areas, especially, we saw this pandemic, right, where we’re living through our computers and our phones, but it was going on long before that.

Running alongside this wearable technology phenomenon is this other phenomenon of attention, the attention economy. What is happening to our attention? Are we addicted? Are we addicted to technology? This is another domain in which I’ve researched for years, and I can’t help but see the two going together. On the one hand, you have technology that’s being designed to capture and extract monetary value, your eyeballs, your click value. Then on the other hand, we have all this technology that’s jumping in and saying, I’m going to help you regulate yourself better. I’m going to help you get up off the couch, remember to drink water, make phone calls, manage you, sleep well. All of these things that we’re not doing so well right now, right? Like we’ve got some problems that we’re wanting to address. And I feel like the problems are coming from technology and the fixes are coming from technology. And that’s fascinating to me.

Jordan This is going to sound like a slightly dystopian follow up, but given the way these things proceed, can you see those two coming together? Your attention and your data is always the value you provide to these companies. Is there a world in which your data collected by your ring or your watch or your Fitbit is then used to say, hey, reminder, you’ve eaten a little too much recently. Why don’t you just have this smoothie for lunch? Or your blood sugar levels are dropping here’s the nearest McDonald’s or whatever. Like every time your data is offered up to a company, there is usually eventually a corresponding use commercially.

Natasha Schull So this is where I would say there’s a big distinction between what you might call the Quantified Self and everything that you just mentioned in your question. Quantified Self is not about designing one solution fits all for the mass market and making money. And they don’t care if you use a pencil and a paper. In fact, a lot of the cutting edge there that you asked about are these simple one button trackers that you just have it in your pocket. Every time you feel a tremor or a certain symptom, you just press that button in your pocket. And this is seen as very elegant, like the height of self tracking in the Quantified Self community. Now, I don’t think that you would see anyone building a big business plan out of that and taking it to the consumer electronic show and getting venture capital, et cetera.

The whole equation of self tracking is so complicated by not only the capitalist imperative, but by data capitalism. The fact that, yes, all of these devices are also capturing data. And how is that going to be used, protected or not protected? It really is the kind of Wild West, and you can imagine all sorts of nefarious things going on and you don’t even need to imagine it because it happens and is happening all the time. So I don’t know that all roads point to some ominous dystopian future. As I’ve tracked this sort of knowledge seeking self-transformational spirit out of Quantified Self meetings into commercial spaces like Best Buy, where I would stand for hours, interview people about what they were hoping to get from devices, or people returning them and what made them angry or frustrated about these things.

I’m a cultural anthropologist, and I try to really tease out how people are experiencing these technologies as well as how they’re being designed and producing these experiences. One can track tracking, so to speak, and see a shift away from devices that give you knowledge and insight and awareness and numbers, all that kind of thing, right? To devices that take care of you without you maybe having to be aware or do the work yourself. I call this algorithmic care, and you can see it in so many different technologies, the little buzzing nudges that we are. Given time to stretch your legs. Maybe you want to take a break. It’s time to have some water. I always think of the Happy Fork, which is a smart fork that will buzz in your mouth. The electronic fork tines will buzz on your teeth if you’ve taken a bite too quickly after the previous bite. There’s also one that tracks your breathing and it will buzz you or vibrate on your body and buzz your phone. And they’ll say your breathing is really shallow and erratic. Try to take some deep breaths. So when you step back and look at all of that, it’s breathing, stepping, biting, eating, drinking. Those are things that infants are expected to master as part of becoming a sort of creative, independent human being in the world, right?

And it’s so interesting to me that all of these frazzled, stressed out adults and I am one of them, right? I find myself fantasizing about the promises that these things could offer me. Oh, maybe that would fix it all if I had this kind of thing to remind me to drink water. And it’s like, why can’t I regulate myself in these basic bodily ways? As a cultural anthropologist, I try to think about, why is that? Why is it that everyone is finding that so challenging? That has a lot to do with other kinds of technologies that are saturating our lives. And I’m not sure that this will fix it. I always think back to the work of D.W. Winnicott, who was a psychologist known for his work with children. And he argued that what he called the good enough mother is a mother who, at first, she adapts to her infant in a way that anything they want is just right there, seamlessly with no friction. They don’t even know where they begin, and the mother ends, right? They’re just sort of merged. But growing up is about introducing friction and introducing frustration. So you let the baby cry a little longer before you feed them, and what does that do? That space of friction and frustration allows a growing being to feel that they have their own boundaries, that they have needs and then to learn how to navigate the world to fill those needs. I’m hungry, I’m thirsty. You learn about yourself, you grow.

The thing that troubles me about the directions that a lot of the consumer grade tracking technologies are taking is that it’s a direction back to a kind of perfect mother who removes all friction and all frustration, like smart home gadgets that will warm the room before you get there, just how you like it, and smart playlists that senses your mood and it’s keeping you in this seamless bubble where you don’t experience frustration and friction. And I think what that removes is a lot of the awareness and possibly the anger and impetus to do something about it that would come if you just let it frustrate you. So there is some kind of opiate of the masses argument one could make about this. This is sort of a technological fix for technological issues of constant distraction, interruption, demands on our time in our pockets, all around us, in front of our faces. And here comes this other set of technology saying, oh, keep doing that. I’ll just regulate you in the background. So that would be my dystopic kind of narrative of how wearable and quote unquote Quantified Self technologies fit into the predicaments of the day.

Jordan Originally, when we began this conversation, I was going to close with like a sarcastic, joking question about if we’re seeing the first steps towards developing a race of cyborgs. We’re not seeing that, but what you just described is like we’re not actually replacing our body parts with robots and technology, but we are increasingly allowing our technology to use us like robots. So maybe it’s not that off basic question at all.

Natasha Schull I think all of these different technologies are serving a sentinel purpose. We are allocating to them, we’re delegating to them the responsibility of being vigilant because we don’t have the bandwidth to maintain that level of attention and vigilance amid all the polls on our attention from other places. So if these represent some sort of cyborgs, they are cyborgs whose function, the prosthetic function they fill is to watch and track us and wait for when we need to be reminded. Stretch your legs, call your mother, take a drink, time to go to bed.

Jordan Natasha, thank you so much for this.

Natasha Schull Thank you.

Jordan Natasha Schull of New York University. You can look for her second book. It’s called Keeping Track. That was The Big Story. For more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. Talk to us anytime via email[click here!]. And of course you can call us 416-935-5935 and you can tell us things like what’s the smallest number of steps you’ve ever taken in a day? If you’re listening to this and a podcast player that lets you review us, please do so. If you’re not, why not find one that does and say, hello, thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Bye.

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