stopped answering group e-mails in the morning because data showed the majority of the issues worked themselves out by the afternoon. 3 Sound familiar?
Another key benefit Wolfram describes in the article is the idea of augmented memory, when the aggregate data of our lives will be made available to us at all times. Think of your life as if every word and action were an e-mail stored in a database, searchable in an instant—that’s the idea of augmented memory. The paradigm shift of fully augmented memory will have massive cultural repercussions, both positive and negative. Recording the experiences of our lives in photos and audio or video formats has been limited technically to this point due to battery life of hardware and lack of storage for content. Battery life is improving at a rapid rate, and the evolution of cloud computing (servers that access and store your data remotely, versus being stored on your hard drive) means if we can afford to pay for storage, it’s available. Augmented memory enabled by these technologies will provide for the following types of applications:
You’re at a conference and someone you don’t recognize smiles and walks toward you. Using facial recognition technology, you can quickly scan past life-recordings to see how you know the person.
You can run tests on your e-mails for the past year for keystroke data (how hard you hit the keys, serving as a proxy for anger/stress) and see what times of the day or week you tend to be emotional and how that affects people’s responses to your messages.
You can cross-reference your GPS data with your e-mails, using sentiment analysis (technology that identifies certain words that infer positive, negative, or neutral language patterns) to identify the places where you are most productive.
These examples should show you why quantified self–analysis won’t stay only in the realm of life-loggers or health enthusiasts for long. Hacking H(app)iness, or owning your data in this context, isn’t just about protecting it—it’s about liberating it to be useful in ways it’s never been used before.
Objectivity in Action
Another aspect of self-measurement that’s a challenge for people is staying objective. There’s deep emotion tied to something like losing weight or keeping your house clean. But a key component to quantified self is the skill of articulated observation. I developed this skill over the years as a professional actor and writer. It takes practice to look at a person (or yourself) and simply record what you see. You would think stillness would be easy to achieve, but it’s actually very challenging. We are hard-coded toward bias and judging others. It’s in our DNA as a remnant from our ancient past when we relied on our fight-or-flight mechanisms to keep us safe.
Here’s an exercise you can try to cultivate your nonjudgmental observation skills. Record yourself on video standing and reading a passage of poetry or a passage of a play. Something you’re passionate about. Perform it. Have fun doing it and don’t worry about the caliber of your acting. The focus of the exercise is actually about your response to watching the video. If you cringe watching a recording of yourself, pretend you’re watching someone else and just describe what you see.
Most young actors (myself included) don’t realize how much energy is stored in their bodies that comes out when they recite apassage of a script until the first time they see themselves on video. For instance, “flappy hand” is a common occurrence with young actors: While saying lines from a scene, their whole body will remain unmoving but one hand will gesticulate wildly as if it’s caught on fire. A good acting teacher will point out the latent energy in the person’s hand and have the actor take a deep breath from their diaphragm (the power center for breathing versus your lungs/shoulders) before starting again. Typically after two or three repetitions of this exercise,
Another key benefit Wolfram describes in the article is the idea of augmented memory, when the aggregate data of our lives will be made available to us at all times. Think of your life as if every word and action were an e-mail stored in a database, searchable in an instant—that’s the idea of augmented memory. The paradigm shift of fully augmented memory will have massive cultural repercussions, both positive and negative. Recording the experiences of our lives in photos and audio or video formats has been limited technically to this point due to battery life of hardware and lack of storage for content. Battery life is improving at a rapid rate, and the evolution of cloud computing (servers that access and store your data remotely, versus being stored on your hard drive) means if we can afford to pay for storage, it’s available. Augmented memory enabled by these technologies will provide for the following types of applications:
You’re at a conference and someone you don’t recognize smiles and walks toward you. Using facial recognition technology, you can quickly scan past life-recordings to see how you know the person.
You can run tests on your e-mails for the past year for keystroke data (how hard you hit the keys, serving as a proxy for anger/stress) and see what times of the day or week you tend to be emotional and how that affects people’s responses to your messages.
You can cross-reference your GPS data with your e-mails, using sentiment analysis (technology that identifies certain words that infer positive, negative, or neutral language patterns) to identify the places where you are most productive.
These examples should show you why quantified self–analysis won’t stay only in the realm of life-loggers or health enthusiasts for long. Hacking H(app)iness, or owning your data in this context, isn’t just about protecting it—it’s about liberating it to be useful in ways it’s never been used before.
Objectivity in Action
Another aspect of self-measurement that’s a challenge for people is staying objective. There’s deep emotion tied to something like losing weight or keeping your house clean. But a key component to quantified self is the skill of articulated observation. I developed this skill over the years as a professional actor and writer. It takes practice to look at a person (or yourself) and simply record what you see. You would think stillness would be easy to achieve, but it’s actually very challenging. We are hard-coded toward bias and judging others. It’s in our DNA as a remnant from our ancient past when we relied on our fight-or-flight mechanisms to keep us safe.
Here’s an exercise you can try to cultivate your nonjudgmental observation skills. Record yourself on video standing and reading a passage of poetry or a passage of a play. Something you’re passionate about. Perform it. Have fun doing it and don’t worry about the caliber of your acting. The focus of the exercise is actually about your response to watching the video. If you cringe watching a recording of yourself, pretend you’re watching someone else and just describe what you see.
Most young actors (myself included) don’t realize how much energy is stored in their bodies that comes out when they recite apassage of a script until the first time they see themselves on video. For instance, “flappy hand” is a common occurrence with young actors: While saying lines from a scene, their whole body will remain unmoving but one hand will gesticulate wildly as if it’s caught on fire. A good acting teacher will point out the latent energy in the person’s hand and have the actor take a deep breath from their diaphragm (the power center for breathing versus your lungs/shoulders) before starting again. Typically after two or three repetitions of this exercise,
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