Akademik

n.

A person who uses websites or other technologies to meticulously track various aspects of his or her body, mental state, and activities.

—self-tracking pp.

The Internet had long ago turned navel-gazing into an international pastime, but self-tracking takes the self-absorption to a new level. Using elaborate graphs, pie charts, websites and newer technologies, self-trackers catalogue everything in their lives, sometimes with no clear result.

—Zosia Bielski, " My so-called life: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090219.wltracking19/BNStory/lifeMain/," The Globe and Mail, February 19, 2009

Are self-trackers narcissists? In the video above, from the recent QS Show&Tell, I report on trying to find an answer. Here I give a quick summary of that talk and a reference link. I decided to run this test because a few weeks ago Alexandra Carmichael made a detailed and helpful report on her self-tracking project. Sandy Lane made the following comment:

Does it measure your narcissism too?

Gary Wolf, " Are Self-Trackers Narcissists?: http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2009/02/are-self-trackers-narcissists.php," The Quantified Self: http://www.quantifiedself.com/, February 17, 2009

Messina and Evans prefer the term "data junkies," spoken with the self-effacing self-awareness that comes from months of meticulous self-study.

Self-trackers like Messina and Evans could spend hours online, charting, analyzing, tracking. Life as a series of pure, distilled data points, up for interpretation.

—Monica Hesse, " Bytes of Life: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/08/AR2008090802681.html," The Washington Post, September 9, 2008