In his ninth edition of the personal report, Nicholas Felton looks at communication through his phone, email, Facebook, and physical mail.
Also, don’t miss the short video from the New York Times. Felton is half-jokingly asked if he’s obsessive compulsive which always amuses me.
It reminds me of when I asked someone about her pedometer, and she gladly talked about how she logged her steps every day for nearly a decade. Days with a lot of steps reminded her of trips or long walks. So naturally, I brought up my dissertation work on personal data collection. I thought she would be totally into it, but she was skeptical. She wondered why anyone would want to collect data on their location, computer usage, or sleep habits. And again, this was right after she told me about her decade of step logs.
There’s a disconnect.
Actively looking at your data seems to cross you over to the obsessive side. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but the separation between the active and passive seems to be getting fuzzier. Maybe one day there’ll be a guy in an interview who doesn’t collect data about himself, and everyone is curious why.
