Are You Data, or Are You Out?

If you're reading this you are one of the 34 percent of humans estimated to use the Internet. It also means you’re probably—definitely—contributing to the massive troves of data continually heating up servers in warehouses all over the country.

If this makes you feel uncomfortable or vulnerable in light of the recent revelations of NSA domestic data collection, then that’s understandable.

Even before our government's surveillance indisputably existed, however, many of us had inklings of it. The idea that ours is the age of Big Data has thoroughly spread through our society. Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil, writing for The Harvard Business Review, even called “data science” the “sexiest profession of the 21st century”. If that’s true, is it really all that crazy not to expect the government to want to get in on it?

Either way, it is sort of hard to deny the potential that data might offer. Anything that allows Google to use artificial neural networks built from 16,000 processors to learn how to recognize pictures of cats on the Internet is serious business indeed.

It’s not just our brotherly government and corporate behemoths that love data though. Some civilians have jumped on the data bandwagon on their own volition. For a more select few, like British scientist Stephen Wolfram, it has been a life-long passion. He’s been quantifying his existence since before PRISM was even a twinkle in George W. Bush’s eye.

Wolfram, who may be best known for his infinitely convenient answer engine Wolfram Alpha, is deeply into what he refers to as “personal analytics”. He is constantly accumulating any and all data from his personal life that can be conveniently recorded and stored. He’s kept track of every email he’s sent or received for over two decades. He’s recorded every keystroke on his computer keyboards, so he knows with certainty that he’s typed over 33,000 distinct English words. He can even tell you how likely he is to be talking on the phone at any given time of the day down to a tenth of a percentile, all because of a self-described effort at “self awareness.”

Fundamentally, Wolfram believes that it is possible to “extract stories from personal data,” and he is not the only person interested in looking at his own.

Russ Poldrack, a faculty member at the University of Texas - Austin, has his own means of personal analytics, which he applies in the context of his professional field: neuroscience.

As part of a yearlong personal experiment, Poldrack regularly fills out surveys that he’s made for himself to gain an objective perspective on his regular mood. He compares his mood assessment data to the MRI brain scans he undergoes twice a week. He even draws his blood weekly for RNA analysis, just so he knows what kinds of proteins, and in what amounts, his body makes throughout the year.

Where Wolfram may appear to champion data for the mere sake of it being data, Poldrack hopes it'll show him something more specific. He wants to understand, if only for himself, what a brain scan might say about his mood, and how it remains consistent or changes over long periods of time.

While his informal methodology inherently limits the worth of his results as legitimate scientific resources, Poldrack’s efforts are remarkable in their use of the tools at his disposal to try to glean knowledge that would not otherwise be obvious.

Presumably, each of us generates data of different sorts, each of which might depict our own different narratives. Our Facebook profiles are sometime lazy, reflexive manifestations of this, which Wolfram actually attempts to put into perspective with his Personal Analytics for Facebook app. But there are so many other things we could be measuring if we were to ever feel so inclined. Doing so might teach us a lot about ourselves if we knew how to go about making sense of all that might pile up.

The prospect of everyday people engaging in personal analytics of this sort still seems a ways off. It’s still just too incredibly nerdy, as even Wolfram will admit. Still, he predicts that soon enough “everyone will be doing it, and wondering how they could have ever gotten by before. And wishing they had started sooner, and hadn’t 'lost' their earlier years.”