Jon Mountjoy's Blog

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The Instrumented Self

What if you could instrument activities in your life, analyse them, and learn from them? What if you socialised that data, or produced analysis centres which found patterns? I spent 30 minutes thinking about this after my internet connection went down, and came up with a bunch of questions.

The Instrumented Self

Instrument your heart. Go grab a heart rate monitor and wear it for a while. I wear one at the gym, but I'd like one I can wear all the time. What could I tell about myself? I strongly suspect there's a good correlation between raised heart rate (at least over a few days) and my happiness.

Instrument your well being. Okay, happiness is a little more difficult to measure - so how about stress levels. Well, measure the the cortisol in your saliva (spitting every few hours) and you have a reasonably good indicator of stress. And why is that useful? Well, go read Robert Sapolsky's excellent Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, or better yet, listen to a great lecture of his on the subject (#94 on iTunes here), and learn what stress does to you.

Instrument your calendar. Don't just attend meetings. Measure the impact of those meetings. What's the impact on your heart rate, or your stress? Wouldn't that be interesting to know?

Instrument your walking. Okay, we all know how to do this with a nice little gadget, like the Fitbit say.

Instrument your bed. Your sleep, more specifically. Even an iPhone with Sleep Cycle can do that.

What else could we instrument?

How much garbage is generated in your house every day
How much petrol you use every month
How many emails you send every day
How many times you pick up your phone
How many times you switch between windows on your computer
Your credit card (see blippy)
Your speech
Tons of stuff of course - the list is endless.

There's so much in our lives that can now be easily instrumented if we had the right tooling. But it strikes me that the instrumentation part is relatively easy. It's easy to record our speech. It's difficult to analyse it.

Easy Instrumentation

Ideally you want instrumentation to be easy and implicit. Using devices like a heart rate monitor, Fitbit and Sleep Cycle are mostly implicit. I don't have to "do anything" for something to be measured.

The stress measurement is a little more difficult - I have no idea if someone can measure something like that a little less explicitly than hawking. It would be amazing if we could instrument eating. I suspect that's a little difficult, but there already gadgets to instrument your faeces...

Change - Graphical, Daily, In Your Face

But we know we're stressed - do we do anything about it? What if we knew it graphically, unambiguously? What if we instrumented ourselves and analysed that data? What if we got an email every day with interesting results? Would we act on that data?

I think some people will be encouraged to act - to change. Not everyone for sure - but if I knew that eating beans on Tuesday makes me feel good on Wednesday, well, I'll eat more beans. Of course, people know that smoking is bad for them. What if the "bad" was measured? What if they saw a graph of continual degradation in lung capacity, distance walked and so on - and made "bad" more "real"?

What if that data was socialised? Perhaps between my close friends, or work colleagues? Would we act on the data then?

There's a large psychological aspect to this - which would be fascinating. What's the impact of all of this on behaviour, or how could we create a positive impact?

The Problem

What if we had the instrumented-self-as-a-service? Imagine vast numbers of instrumented humans feeding their data to a central service that drew even more interesting results.

Perhaps there's a collective increase in well-being near the end of the month after the pay check arrives. Or perhaps the local store shutting down means that everyone in my neighbourhood now walks a little further to the nearest store?

We'll need a little more than simple sentiment analysis to do this kind of analysis - and it sounds to me like this is one of the greatest problems with this idea.

The Naysayers

I think this is tremendously exciting and interesting - yet I can already hear the moaning naysayers. I had some of my DNA tested (using 23andMe) and tell people about it (usually quite excitedly) - yet I'm always surprised by the number of people who I meet who are totally and utterly aghast that I would do this.

After privacy, there major concern appears to be "what if I learned something bad". They're worried about learning something.

Side note: 23andMe learn things - they ask their users to answer small questionnaires. They're learning more about correlations between genes and diseases & behaviour. Getting better the more people use them. There's no reason something analysing our walking, eating, spending and defecating patterns couldn't do the same.

How Are You?

We get asked this a lot. How are you? Well, what if I answered with a few graphs? What part of me are you really asking about? Sure, it's usually phatic, but sometimes there's real interest behind that question.

We lead these private lives (yet buy a tremendous amount on a credit card that is pretty well instrumented by financial institutions). Why is these data in their hands instead of ours? Why are large corporations changing the way shops sell based on our data - yet we don't have access to it ourselves?

How are you? Imagine being able to answer this holistically. The health you - the mind you - the financial you - the ...

The Quantified Self

I started thinking about this after knowledgeable friend Andy Hyde put me onto an interesting NPR podcast On the Media which had a pointer to a blog on The Quantified Self . "Self knowledge through numbers". That's a little cold - but that's the heart of it.

Also check out this interesting TED talk by Deb Roy who analysed 90K hours of video to learn stuff about himself and his family. The techniques he used are powerful and implicit. (I had 4 tabs open to this stuff before my internet connection went down, so most of this has been written offline (a slow 3G) without referencing other material).

The Instrumented Self

Knowing more about my genotype has told me a little more about my phenotype. Sure, I am not just the result of my genes - there's context too and more besides. That's how I see the Instrumented Self. These data won't tell us everything - but correlating multiple metrics will go a little way towards telling us something meaningful - and the more metrics we put in there, the more of us that we instrument - the more context and insight we could draw from this.

Tagged instrumentation social media stress

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It's Okay to Be You Most of the Time, Surely?

These issues are so confusing. I see value in being transparent, in being public, yet I value some aspects of my privacy. I care for some aspects of my reputation (my professional life) but not others (my poor taste in music). I imagine we're all like that to some degree. As more and more of us use Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and so on, what is being said about us is increasingly not under our control. We need better privacy, but perhaps also a better acceptance of publicity.

Privacy

As danah boyd eloquently argues:

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows.

The disturbing "inversion of defaults when it comes to what's public and what's private" that we're seeing (see Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites Automatically for another example) appears to be growing, and I can't do a thing about an acquaintance tweeting that they met me at a restaurant. So of course I want privacy when I want it, and I want controls to enforce it when I want it.

But in other cases I don't mind. I don't mind if I am pictured in a pub with a beer (I prefer wine), or that my religion (or lack thereof) is known, or if you know what books I'm reading. Not right now. We're all open and public to varying degrees, and that's also okay.

Publicity

I've argued before that while we do need to consider privacy, we also need to consider publicity. If I perform well at work, should my manager care that I had 3 hours sleep after a ski trip, and that the pictures of that event are publicly available? Probably not.

While we're used to hear-say and gossip about individuals, social media and search (and permanence of medium) takes this to a different level - and while we need more control over privacy settings, we also need society to be less concerned about public information. Michael Arrington feels the same way:

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

Culture Change

We're all human. We have philandering monarchs and ex-pot-smoking prime ministers - and it's beginning to matter less and less. Thankfully. In the context of their jobs, what matters is whether they can do the job. (The philandering may matter in the context of their family life of course - context is key.) Arrington continues with:

We’re going to be forced to adjust as a society. I firmly believe that we will simply become much more accepting of indiscretions over time. Employers just won’t care that ridiculous drunk college pictures pop up about you when they do a HR background search on you.

As the younger Facebook generation move into HR positions, perhaps the change will be accelerated - but this is a culture change, and I wonder how long it will take.

What I'm concerned about are those that hide, that block public access to all their activity, yet want to be public. I have friends that do this - torn between wanting to be transparent about their lives (to some degree), but fearful that such transparency would lead to their downfall (in some other context). We shouldn't need to hide that which we don't feel the need to - we should have license to be human - and that's a change in society and culture. None of these issues are new - they're just more profound in an online environment where indiscretions from 10 years ago can persist and be collated.

There are so many fascinating moving parts to this. The Internet is forcing these changes in our culture. At some stage fairly soon we're probably going to have to figure out answers to hard questions. Just what public actions of mine are "acceptable" in which contexts? How much should a CEO's public life filled with indiscretions affect his company's brand? To what extent are we "representatives" of the company for which we work?

Tagged culture privacy public life social media

Posted

Blurring Boundaries in Social Media - How Buzz should learn from FriendFeed

Unless you're a rather single-minded in your use of social media, you probably do more than one thing online. You might share your photographs on Flickr, your presentations on SlideShare, your status updates on Twitter, your books on Goodreads. You may "like" items on Google Reader, recommend TED talks you enjoy or share your current music track. You get the picture. You are multifaceted. We all are. But are you interesting in "all of" someone else. Most likely not.

Weak Boundaries around your Identities

I can put weak boundaries around my social media interactions. For example, I have a Flickr account and occasional conversations take place there. I have a different set of friends there, than I do on Twitter. I don't tweet each photo I post either. So what we have are weak boundaries around my presences on each site.

The boundaries are weak because my identities are open and these particular social media sites support aggregation. Anyone could aggregate these two streams of activity if they wanted to.

Boundaries as Context

Another way to look at these boundaries is that they provide context. When viewing my photographs on Flickr, the context is obvious. You're expecting photographs, not rants about my lack of hot water. The context provides you with expectations, informs you, and lets you choose whether you want to be part of that part of me.

"But it's the Whole Me"

Aggregation sites (and even Facebook, but that's a discussion for the future) let you aggregate your content from any number of social media sites. I think there's something compelling about these services. After all, by aggregating these various aspects of yourself, you're giving would-be "followers" a much more holistic picture of yourself - and isn't that something we all want to do? "I'm not just the web site maintainer; I'm a budding book author and I take killer shots with my Canon...." See me for who I am! I'm human, not just a service machine. And so on.

Is this compelling feature of social media sites such as FriendFeed and Google Buzz really the right way to go though?

Think about those boundaries and context again. By aggregating disparate streams, what we're doing is blurring boundaries, and blurring context. Unless the aggregation is coherent (your photos are about conferences you go to, the books are about the conference topics, your tweets are about your related research), or unless you're aggregating in a context where that mashup is somehow expected (Facebook comes to mind, see above), then what's really happening with aggregation is a destruction of context.

It's noise. It's also likely to set you up for interesting aspects of privacy and hierarchy. Your manager may follow your Twitter stream (context = I tweet about work). Your Buzz stream may contain your Twitter and your Flickr photos though (you work weekends in nightclubs). Aggregating these reinforces your identity, but it also blurs the boundaries and contexts, and I suspect that's more often than not, not a good thing.

FriendFeed had a nice little feature, as Mike Coulter reminded me. You can, as a subscriber of an aggregated feed, ignore the photos say. That's a useful feature - it lets me cut out the noise if i like, and ensure that the input has a context I want. I can prune you :-) Buzz doesn't have that - I hope it implements the feature. However, I suspect the rest of the concerns here still hold.

Postscript:

There are some interesting protocols around aggregation - see RWW on Activity Streams - which make this even easier. Somehow I'd like them to build in "context" as well though. Perhaps we can tag the items being aggregated as a first step (personal, work, etc.).

Tagged activity streams aggregation boundaries context identity social media

Posted

The Democratization of Intimacy

Isn't that a great phrase? - "The Democratization of Intimacy" I got that from Stefana Broadbent's talk at TED, How the Internet Enables Intimacy.

It has some great insights into how we have communicated with our family over the years. Imagine:

many centuries ago, you lived where you worked, whether in a workshop or on the land or roaming the savannah - there was family intimacy
in medieval cities you had boroughs named after the guilds and professions - again, you have intimacy here
after the industrial revolution, you have a clear separation of work and family. You clock in, you work, you give your work full attention, you clock out, and then your return to your family. Here, intimacy is lost
culturally, we sustain this. Kindergartens and schools all emphasise this behaviour pattern. Even when technology was available (ie. the phone), it was still taboo

And now? Now we have social media. We have chat rooms, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and more - unless your company is backward looking.

It's a very different perspective on social media (although Stefana doesn't frame the talk in these terms). Social media isn't just about being social, about conversations, about communication - it enables something a lot deeper - intimacy. Intimacy is leaking into our professional lives, and the change is for the better. Social media has made this a lot more acceptable.

While the technology barriers were lifted many years ago, the cultural ones often remain in place. The habits that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter engender, habits like real-time status updates, synchronous chatting, asynchronous emails, groups, multimedia and more - are now becoming everyday habits. I now expect and demand to work in an environment that lets me use Facebook for example.

This probably has many other implications on attention, and on notions of work/life balance, as well as privacy. But for now, I'm relishing in the cultural change towards a democratization of intimacy.

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefana_broadbent_how_the_internet_enables_intimacy.html

Tagged cultural change social media work/life balance

Posted

Iniquitous social platforms - free my data!

Scarcity power over your social connections is the lynchpin of many social networking sites. If only LinkedIn has the power to connect you to a business colleague, because that's where your contacts, your social graph, resides - well that's going to do LinkedIn a lot of good. If on the other hand you open your social graph, free it from the grip of LinkedIn (or Plaxo, or Facebook, or ...), where does that leave the likes of LinkedIn? Will they be far less competitive without your social graph? Undoubtedly. Will Facebook? Perhaps not - Facebook has a platform built around the graph, which provide an abundance of additional functionality.

A while back I wanted a website where I can share and record books that I'm reading. After a few searches, I ended up on goodreads, which has a lot of nice functionality. Cool, I thought. Then I started experimenting with Facebook, and goodreads didn't have any Facebook integration then so I started using "Visual Bookshelf" on Facebook. Great, now I could share the books I read with friends in my Facebook social network. And it works too. But in my excitement I forgot to check on something: can I export my data from Visual Bookshelf? The answer appears to be a resounding no. This cuts to the heart of open data. This is what makes Visual Bookshelf iniquitous (I'm reading Wodehouse) - it is utterly unacceptable for a site not to provide export functionality of my data. Flickr does it, which is why I trust it with my photos. Okay, it doesn't provide an export button, but searching for export in the help makes it clear how easy it is. Visual Bookshelf does not.

What's linking these two thoughts? I recently read this great article on wired, Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up, damning the Facebooks and MySpaces for holding onto our data. Artur Bergman then pointed out the manifesto, Thoughts on the Social Graph, which makes a great point at explaining how these social networks, from Facebook to LinkedIn, are holding on to my social graph, and what you can do about it. I think the problem area should be expanded a little, especially when social networks become platforms as Facebook has done. I want Facebook to liberate my social graph, but I also want the applications that I use on Facebook to liberate my data too. Trawling around goodreads, I found that they now have an API. So I'm in the process of dumping Visual Bookshelf and returning to goodreads, in the hope that they'll make it dead simple for me to export my reviews in future, and that they fix their abysmal Facebook integration.But a question remains: What makes people so eager to use an application without thinking about the consequences of what it means to their data? Why do millions of people continue to store their book reviews in goodreads and visual bookshelf and Amazon?

Do they expect these companies to be around in a decade or two? In other words, do they expect permanence?
Do they expect that these companies will act in good faith and provide an export feature in future?
Are they not interested in the data? Perhaps they just want to express themselves now - if it's temporary well that's okay.

It's quite okay to be in the temporary camp. My throwaway data may be your bread and butter; that's okay.For those in the permanence camp and good faith camps - we need to do a lot more to ensure our data survives the company hosting it. Is it really too much to ask that our contributions to Amazon and LinkedIn and Facebook remain ours? Even if I publish my liberated book reviews on my own site, that's not going to undermine the true value of Amazon (selling the book) or goodreads (aggregating my book shelves).I'm still willing to make use of these services, just let me have my data.

Tagged open data social media

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The Instrumented Self

It's Okay to Be You Most of the Time, Surely?

Blurring Boundaries in Social Media - How Buzz should learn from FriendFeed

The Democratization of Intimacy

Iniquitous social platforms - free my data!

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