Some do it to observe, others to optimise, others to see how far they can go before they overclock their systems,

Now in the bright dawn of the app, smartphones are luring the unsuspecting into self-tracking. Before long that sleep-monitoring-app-that-must-be-tried converts into harmless productivity logging, the odd location check-in, daily pedometer use, and soon enough you’re surrounded by those hooked on quantifying the daily data their lives have been generating. Ordinary people will be overheard at the next table sharing hacks for their personal genome [okay well maybe that one has a way to go, but not as faraway as you'd think].

Judge this as narcissism or the sport of OCD neurotics in error.
[Bless Twitter for the recency of its mainstream conversion from much-mocked to must-have. Web economics or triumph do not conform to what is intuitive; what looks silly today may command fortunes of the future]. A self-tracker’s numbers and observations may be uploaded for personal interest, but shared with others in a forum or social network could have potential species-wide benefit. Patterns form out of the data sets and occasionally unexpected utility, cures and fast-tracks emerge and this progress is available immediately to all those searching for a solution to try out too, their feedback strengthening or squashing the finding. The rate with which we’re co-evolving with our technology means that nothing as useful as a fork need take centuries to catch on anymore.

We’re grabbing what works, remixing to suit our context, sharing the results outside the sacred circle of state, company and school so it’s fast, damn fast. No waiting about for medical, commercial or political solutions to be implemented at glacial pace and great expense. Citizen-surgery won’t be the next big thing, and doctors won’t be a diminishing species, but they’re probably less likely to be mistaken for gods. Pity the physicians in years to come. Loaded not only with deep-mined info from the Internet, patients will also presenting their personal biometrics, self-diagnoses and realtime search to check on the doctor’s prescription as the script is being written. With a strong personal motivation to find an answer we can track ourselves as we go through life-as-usual: neutralising the weird distortion of examining a subject alone in a lab is a helpful side-effect.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. – Douglas Adams

As anyone who’s peered behind their assumptions by doing even rudimentary web-analytics knows, naked feedback data is rarely what we expect. It favours those who have a curious mind and the tenacity to dig deeper with increasingly refined questions. Why the heck do you have most of your referral traffic coming from people searching for pelagic bird-watching tours when your trade is selling woolly cardigans to lumberjacks? The fun is hunting the connections; have you been hacked by a renegade twitcher network? Perhaps your bestselling jumper is named after a rare albatross never yet seen on shore? Maybe someone mis-mapped you as the HQ of Seabird Central?
So too self-trackers use their data to fill the gap between perception and reality. Can’t fathom why you work so damn hard and get so little done? Why do you wake up feeling like a zombie after your allotted 8 hours? You run marathons, so why do you have a body-fat percentage of a baby seal? There’s an app for that ..get tracking and hunting. In the anomalies we often find ingenious or the simple but elusive aha answers.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ..‘that’s funny‘ – Isaac Asimov

If there’s a prediction for 2011 that is worth setting an alert for that has more than twinkly trend in its DNA, it’s this. Self-tracking marries beautifully with game mechanics and non-dorky-looking gadgets to be both fun and commercially interesting for the main market now too. With particularly rewarding applications possible for medical insurance companies and health ministries who have enormous financial interest in keeping their members/citizens well.

Gary Wolf, contributing editor at Wired, who started the Quantified Self blog back in 1997 with the legendary Kevin Kelly, wrote a rich piece on self-measurement for The New York Times last year, The Data-Driven Life that’s well worth the read to get up to speed: [extract]

Trackers focused on their health want to ensure that their medical practitioners don’t miss the particulars of their condition; trackers who record their mental states are often trying to find their own way to personal fulfillment amid the seductions of marketing and the errors of common opinion; fitness trackers are trying to tune their training regimes to their own body types and competitive goals, but they are also looking to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to uncover potential they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means.

“My girlfriend thinks I’m the weird person when I wear all these devices,” Bo Adler says. “She sees me as an oddity, but I say no, soon everybody is going to be doing this, and you won’t even notice.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html

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In the interests of declaring my bias, I need to own up to being a self-tracker/-experimenter/ -researcher /-logger for most of my life. With so much physics, chemistry, history, biology, anthropology and general whatthe-ology to discover about ourselves – and so much hypochondria to allay if you read too much – it never gets dull, but it’s not heretofore been fashionable dinner-party conversation. So I’m looking forward to the excitement building around it. Not to mention the increasing abundance of more awesome gadgets on offer, now in stylish packaging.

This one’s going to be big, as a social-behavioural mod it will have rolling impact into economic and political policy, slowly but certainly. Unlikely you say? Put it on your alerts and watch. Let’s roll together a few Quantified Self meetups, and see if you don’t get a thrill from seeing the superhero rippling under the clark-kent veneer.
It’s so much more than geek-sport.

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Are you a self-tracker? Got a thing for productivity apps, develop funny hypotheses about your training, time, nutrition and test them (on yourself not hapless clients), got a thing for spreadsheets and pedometers? Did you realise your hobby doesn’t relegate you to lone freakery any longer? Self-trackers, shout your barbaric yawp from the rooftops, your time in the sunshine has finally come.

What luck for rulers, that men do not think. – Adolph Hitler

The Internet is a copy machine.  At a fundamental distribution level, but also at the human content level. Copying what we see and like, or realise gets results, is one of the keys to how humans have been such a successful species. What is unusual about it is that we will do so at the cost of common sense or logic. Unlikely as it would seem, it is a success strategy. Thinking is biologically expensive, and with 20% of our nutrients and oxygen going to the brain, the more efficient we can make that, the better. Humans are natural born hackers. We spot one of our tribe doing something that yields results and we try out the behaviour ourselves, even if we have no idea of the mechanics or conditionst that led to it. If it works it stays. And others copy us. If we don’t understand why it worked in the first instance, it needn’t be a reason not to use it. So are born a myriad of useful hacks that keep us safe, allow us to build on each others creativity and engineering. So too, rituals and traditions, and beliefs that have long ago shed the essence of the logic or context that made them work – mostly harmless but some of these thinking hacks with sufficient uptake or legacy are mistaken for Truth and can go rogue. Believing is easier than thinking.

The Internet only cranks up the volume, it doesn’t lead to shoddy thinking, it’s merely the best damn distribution system since bacteria hacked airborne transport. We’ve been brain hacking for millenia, there’s no stopping us now. What is critical is that we keep the ratio of thinking to believing and copying in lively balance.

Being close to the source as possible counts because it works like a Chinese telephone game. Like any signal down a line, eventually it erodes into unintelligible fuzz. None of the activating intelligence is left. Sometimes the shell still keeps doing the rounds anyway because its packaged so prettily.

For all the disdain that rains upon bloggers for mindlessness, the critics often fail to recognise that as newspapers burgeoned and the rush to be first, or to stuff content to marry off to advertising grew over the past decades – so too did the quick hack of regurgitating press releases, copying wire feeds and churning empty caloried opinion on their pages. Why slog and blaze the synaptic fires if someone else is willing to do it for you? The behaviour around journalism was hacked a long time ago. Newspapers of record like the New York Times, rich, reliable mags like New Scientist pay their writers to think and interrogate the truth. And then we cut.paste, RT, blog, email, whatever your flavour, to pass on what we believe in. Or reinforces our reality.

Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of the decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking. – Fred Friendly

The few on the thinking side have to work harder and burn more cognitive juice. They are the context providers not merely content providers. Their job is not to comfortably reinforce our thinking by mouthing cliches. They’re also least likely to be voted most popular because of that expensive thinking problem. Few of us enjoy the recalibration of our beliefs that thinking often effects, it’s unsteadying; give us emotion yes, intrigue surely, but deep analysis that doesn’t offer a safe answer, eh. It’s like eating broccoli for most of us. Why would you choose veggies when takeaways are tastier, cheaper and quicker?

Like eating fresh food and exercising it takes more time, costs more and often hurts while you’re doing it, but there’s nothing like it for avoiding the fate of a flabby homogenous consumer. Smart is sexy.

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RECOMMENDED :

PS. if you haven’t, you do want to read Kevin Kelly’s piece on Better than Free: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

AND also do hunt down Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society or watch this clip from Fora.tv at the very least:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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One of the best places to get into a cerebral spin-class is The Daily Maverick, almost a year old now, and beloved by thinkers for not choosing the takeaway-in-pretty-packaging route. In celebration of their brave move from wholly print to wholly online at the beginning of November 2009, they’ll be gathering some of the smartest (also least-likely-to-mouth-cliches) people and some of their ferociously bright, opinionated readers into a room and let them loose on each other for the day.
The Gathering. Brainy bootcamp baby.

It’s not cheap (now up to R3000), it’s a whole day (4th Nov 2010, no work for you) and it’ll be a workout. But I am so looking forward to it!
The synaptic fritzing power of the DM team* is enough to short-circuit most people and send them scurrying to a gossip mag to recover.
But in accompaniment the speakers roll looks like this:

• Zwelinzima Vavi, general-secretary of Cosatu
• Michael Jordaan, CEO of First National Bank
• Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City and Moxyland
• Khaya Dlanga, prolific blogger and troublemaker
• Richard Mulholland, professional speaker most likely to be confused with a rockstar
• Nic Dawes, editor-in-chief of the Mail & Guardian
• Jovan Regasek, CEO of ITWeb
• Yvonne Johnston, brain-mother to Brand SA and marketer-at-large
• Ivo Vegter, columnist and analyst
• Ray Hartley, Sunday Times editor
• Yusuf Abramjee, head of news and corporate affairs, Primedia
• Terry Annecke, operations director of BlackStone Tek
• Victor Dlamini, chairman of Chillibush
• Stephen Grootes, Eyewitness News reporter
• Mike Ratcliffe, Wine master, Warwick wines
• Toby Shapshak, editor of Stuff magazine.

(and knowing them, there’s likely to be a surprise or two for those who believe).
If you have the fortitude for mental marathons through unfamiliar lands, with a side of good humour -wit a DM signature and is never far away from even the darkest scenario. warning: those dry and serious of demeanour may be startled. It’s going to a riot of the best sort.

Read here and here for more if you need convincing (actually I don’t know if there are still tickets but mail ‘em anyway. If you’re in South Africa on the 4th of Nov, why miss out?)  A little throng of us Capetonians are flying up for it, including Jacques Rousseau, Allan Kent and Dave Duarte. [If you're coming too, please let me know].

* Branko Brkic (editor), Phillip de Wet (deputy), and Kevin Bloom, as well as Stephen Grootes, Sipho Hlongwane, Brooks Spector, Theresa Mallinson and Mandy de Waal. Commit these names to memory for the name tag scan ..and give them that knowing nod. They’re doing their damnedest everyday fending off those fuzzy copies to keep us from floating off into the sea of irrelevance.

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Disclaimer: not only am I a fan, but count members of this brave & bright Daily Maverick clan as friends. I’m not a paid shill. My dharma is to cheer genius when I see it. So be it.
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Marlon was introducing the Reconstructed Living project (RLabs), using that most loved-by-teens|vilified-by-teachers/parents mobile platform, MXit. MXit maven Rafiq Phillips (and one of Marlon’s past students) had shown us that it could be more than just a cheap chat channel, but what ensued from this project astounded everyone.
Lives were saved. Literally not figuratively. Gangsters, drug-dealers, addicts, the suicidal, the abused yanked back from dangling over the abyss by a deceptively simple mobile IM chat platform and some blogging.

Clinton Liederman’s story (From Gangster to Twitter) is just one to share, but gives you a good idea what this is about:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It worked because it used the principles of getting the context right, being in the natural playspace of those who needed it, without interrupting, using the language that is familiar/authentic to that playspace. And more importantly this wasn’t a well-meaning set of social workers on the other end of the IM, the stories were real and rugged and hopeful because they were ex-gangsters, -addicts, -dealers, -abused and had visceral experience of being in a desperate situation – and knew exactly what it takes to get out. The steps not much different from any guidelines NGO’s or government programs may define, but it was infused with life and intelligence because the person delivering the message was the real deal, a makeover, someone who had reconstructed their own lives out of dire/shameful/deadly circumstances. It rang true. and it worked.

Who among us is immune to the charm of the makeover? The before and after pics, the journey through shame and determination, we humans are suckers for these kinds of stories. The thrill of turnaround numbers on a failing business, a doomed economy revitalised into a roaring success by a few tweaks – none can resist the strength of the makeover as social currency, it converts to all markets and lifestyles.

The means of telling those stories changed radically over these last decade. At its core, social media is just a new means of production and distribution. From highly skilled expensive people and equipment and expensive, proprietary distribution, the cost and skills associated to both have dropped to close to zero by comparison.

What is brought on was a great flood of amateurs overrunning the banks of media channels and scared the hell out of the bastions of the Media. It has us all awash in useless, unsubstantiated, surprising, unverified, brilliant, illegal, mashedup, beautiful, horrifying, profound, unstoppable content coursing in from every corner of the world [adds own blog to the flood].

It’s also spawned an egosystem around the “Internet-famous” absorbed in feeding from the bubble of its own coolness. But for all the mockery that it may draw, there are those who have used it to change their fortunes where nothing else could have worked.
The Reconstructed did just that and grabbed the chance to put a surprising twist in to break the expected plot of their lives.

If you live in South Africa, try playing word associations and listen what comes up when you proffer “Cape Flats”. If gangsters, drugs and violence don’t feature, you’re standing before an anomaly, someone who hasn’t seen a TV, read a newspaper or any other traditional media source for perhaps decades. If you come from the Cape Flats (where you’d find RLabs) you have an instant set of archetypes that accompany your journey, a set of prejudices that you probably have to work that much harder to overcome.
We all have our own special set of holographic set that activates when we say what we do, where we’re from, but some are in more intense technicolour than others.

Archetypes and prejudice is a brain evolution that’s helped us become the dominant species on this grand blue ball. We can’t pay attention to everything so we chunk info for efficiency, if we can determine rules for what is good and what is dangerous and tell each other stories to illustrate it rather than each of us discovering afresh that tigers aren’t just big lovable lolcats. If we had to go through a day without our assumptions about how the world (mostly) works, we’d burn throughour brain’s available oxygen and glucose for the day in 13 minutes and pass out from sheer overwhelm. We need shortcodes to make sense of it all.

In more elegant illustration, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie did a talk at TED that goes right to the heart of how dangerous it is to have one defining story about a place or people ..a special dedication to those who lapse into referring to Africa as a country

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s easier for media to tell the sensational stories, the once-offs, and many still follow “if it bleeds it leads” so they aren’t hot on the trail of the feel-good fluffy ones. Social media is more of a tribal thing, and we want to know the backstory and follow-up and whose connected and why. It offers a place to get your own story heard. How you want to tell it, on your terms and on demand, not with the print run, January issue or particular flighting time.

Telling an amazing makeover story, with friends who have done the same, on video, blogs, mobile platforms, forums, in talks, demo’s, social networks, podcasts, radio, print, games is a surefire way to start interrupting a persistent archetype. [Fighting the urge to say transmedia storytelling in here, but that's for another day]. RLabs is starting to make a dent in the story of their community. Using only mediated traditional media it wouldn’t have happened. For them social media isn’t a vanity sport.

It also isn’t about charity. True to form, RLabs takes an unusual position on stepping away from traditional NGO on intravenous funding. Charity isn’t sexy. It numbs creativity and determination. Doing good and doing good business is enlivening. They’ve started a social media strategy unit (oh stop with the groaning, I know) called the Social Media Factory. But if you think it’ll be like any other social media consultancy, you haven’t been paying attention to this story. These are people who have tasted death, who know the power of social media in the way that few of us do, who come bearing character and can help those who need to get a grip on being truthful, strong and connect to their community in more than words. It’ll be anything but anodyne – guaranteed. [no, I don't need a disclaimer, I haven't taken shares].

PS. my favourite new podcast is one I’ve been recommending wildly, the delicious Kitchen Sisters have a new series on NPR called the Hidden World of Girls (7-10 min stories from all over the world that will do your head in, go check it out).

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I had the honour of doing a training session for the hero corps at RLabs last week and recommend it highly! If you have strengths to share to help them circumvent the tiger-as-kitty traps with tricks, tips, equipment, tools, skills to accelarate the reconstruction of more lives through social media, offer here (Rene Parker is the digital dame to get you in, say Max sent ya).

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Habari Media organised what looked to be another big.company.meets.small.country gathering. The gist of the gig: Facebook now offers SA more options on ad placement on the site through a chosen country representative with established relationships, enter: Habari Media. thrilling stuff. In preparation I took an aisle seat by the stairs for the discreet duck when frosty aircon and conference-grade coffee wore off.
Curiously, the show was fairly compelling and I’ll tell you why.

Three things tweaked my perception of Facebook’s global sprawl.
1. the heft and speed of Facebook is hastening the entropy or evolution of media’s relationship with advertising.
2. the company is undertaking an inspired globalization strategy.
3. as you suspected, Mark Zuckerberg (or Google to be sure) has your number.

AD JUICE

The announcement hasn’t been met with general joy at some of our bigger media houses who see ever more leakage of ad revenues on their web publications. Cracks in the wake of Google Ads lumbering through, meant nourishing ad-spend was leaving the local market, and Facebook will do nothing to stem the flow. Elan Lohmann, Digital GM at Avusa murmured colonisation.

There’s a rumour batting about Twitter, that once enough of us suckers who depend on the site for our daily social nibbling are in, they’ll close the doors and charge admission. It was dealt with swiftly: read my lips, Facebook will never charge for membership (Blake Chandlee be lashed if he’s doing a Bush). The model is run solely on ads at the moment, and they’ve barely begun to get interesting.

“Branding is in its infancy online. Anyone who says that brands have embraced the internet is lying” – VP of Emerging Markets EMEA, Blake Chandlee

CROWDSOURCED GLOBALIZATION

From the heady days of the world’s first multinational, the Dutch East India Company to this moment, the opportunity to do business in grand scale has been guaranteed to disrupt. From hilarious product-naming gaffes, tragic resource-plundering, to very costly beliefs that successes are formulaic across borders (a Discovery even some local companies have bitten down on). We bungle in each other’s backyards. Patriotism and protectionism don’t hold back the eventual forces of globalization (North Korea exempt).
We don’t want to be left out, but we don’t want to give up the farm.

Facebook’s approach is one to watch though. Drawing on a Wikipedia-style model of crowdsourcing to get polyglot members to translate the site with head-bending speed, Facebook wins by coming in at the language level first (70 languages served to date). Developers around the world contribute applications that make sense within their context and culture. For free. Genius. It fits because it isn’t a solution retrofitted to a new market, the market crafts what it wants FB to do. No team deployed to set up an office abroad, grab the native intelligence and get it to plug in. That’s the magic.

Facebook is actually a global UTILITY company. As with electricity, we choose to use it, how to use it, and billions of pluggable appliances have been spawned in the wake of being able to tap power into our homes. Without the appliances the electricity is as good as useless. The appliances are developed independently of the supplying energy company. In the same way, we make Facebook useful. [BTW if you haven't read Nicholas Carr's "The Big Switch", it's worth it for the fresh look from history at cloud computing and the next ubiquitous utility layer]

Unlike electricity or fuel, HOW you use it is tracked, monitored and mined for its gems.

THEY’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER

Know this: with a motherlode of data and elegant predictive modeling, the geeks have you decoded. Given a few days worth of initial interactions, your behaviour on the site can be extrapolated for the next six months. It’s all in the algorithms buddy.
If that doesn’t freak you out, your tranquilisers are a little too strong.
Enter left, the conundrum of our time: would you prefer to be known and understood, so that the right products/services shimmer in at just the right time like Jeeves – discreet but omniscient. Or are we happy to bumble along serendipitously, missing out on being a thin-sliced data set, examined at by those who can afford to buy access to your behavioural quirks.

We understand the tacit contract when we engage with trackable modernity, we register for RICA, we upload our photos online, email sensitive correspondence. We secretly know that if it could turn nasty if it went awry; but as our species is prone to, we choose to engage, to trade, to trust because the downside of being left out is infinitely more scary and less profitable.

Hopscotch lightly over the existential traps that await if you think too hard about the fact that baby-faced Marc Elliot Zuckerberg could know you better than a shrink could ever hope to, without ever meeting you. With more colour than the desiccated analysis of an actuary. The patterns that emerge from the flow of your attentions are tradable. Which means a new kind of economy can be shaped.

Okay, okay, enough with the philosophy, what does this mean practically?

For local business, it means you can do more interesting things to draw Facebookers attention your way than the sidebar ads you can buy on your credit card. Now that we’re official m’dear, it just means our status updates, picture tagging, zombie bashing and invitations from those old school friends, have paid off.. we too get to sup at the big table.. if you’re a big player and have the money for big campaigns that is (and bless you for keeping the doors open for us with your money).

Other than that, well nothing much has changed. Go back to your desk, all is well or you’d know it because someone would have posted it on Facebook.

er..

Unless this happens >> (thanks Adrian Hewlett & Comedy Central for this slice of internetlessness)

The TEDxJoburgNorth programme, launching on the 15th July 2009, will  be the beginning of many more such TEDx events in the city. I’m helping to gather the forces for a city.size TED Johannesburg in November with TEDsters and fellow raving fans, under the passionate leadership of publisher Alicia Woolf [want to get the early heads.up on getting your seat or collaborating to make it legendary? mail me or leave a comment below.]

TEDx Events have the same general goals as TED Conferences. TEDx activities are dedicated to leveraging the power of ideas to change the world, and they cover a broad set of topics including science, arts and design, politics, culture, business, global issues, technology and development, and entertainment.

Joburg’s first TEDx organised by:

Extraordinary documentary filmmaker and liaison for HH the Dalai Lama for his visits in South Africa, Guy Lieberman.

Ephraim Moss, a first class geek – using the latest in technologies and computing to develop holistic business and communication systems.

Nachi Mendelow, who considers himself an ever evolving monkey trying to work out why we ever descended from the trees. Loves banana’s, which clearly generates the formidable energy to his supercerebral cortex.

I’ve been invited to give a talk that shakes stale ideas from comfortable crusted niches.. to present ideas worthy of TED grade – dear mercy! (If you haven’t been introduced to the TED treasure >> map here). The brief is simply to talk about the ideas that burn the brightest for us – for 18 minutes. Counterintuitive evidence around my research that “The Machines are making us more Human” will fill my nerve.fraying 18 TEDx minutes. (Not sure there’s any space left – but just in case, I’d love you to join in if you’re in Jo’burg on the 15th July, check here).

————————————- BONUS MATERIAL ————————————-

For TED fans and prospective speakers, below the lesser-revealed TED Commandments that ensure that the talks aren’t just your average powerpoint parade; and why attendees to the annual conferences in California, will do homework in the hopes of being offered an invitation for which they will eagerly pay $6000, if accepted.

(the stone tablet is delivered to TED speakers as they prepare to give the talk of their lives)

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