But the newest tools open possibilities for personal tracking in areas of life that had always seemed inaccessible to quantitative methods. Diarists often chronicle their moods, creating a paper trail that provides a sense of mastery over fleeting emotions. There is a problem, however, with this sort of old-fashioned journal-keeping: You record your mood only when you're in the mood to do so, which introduces a bias. If you impose a regular schedule, noting your feelings at the same time every day, you face the issue that mood varies predictably with time of day and regular cycles of activity. It might seem that we're simply incapable of reliably tracking our own subjective states, but social scientists solved this problem years ago: Just randomize the time of inquiry. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson reported early results using such methods back in 1983, launching a productive line of research in psychology. At the time, of course, this was work for professionals with programmed watches. It wasn't clear how you would direct a random inquiry to yourself.

    With today's technology, such things are now trivial. There is open source software for random experience sampling. This feature is already embedded in tools like Happy Factor, a Facebook app that randomly pings you with a text message, to which you respond with a number indicating your happiness level. There are protocols for measuring mental fitness that take less than five minutes to complete and provide a baseline for experiments on your brain's agility. The Web site CureTogether lets users log an enormous range of conditions, symptoms, and feelings. Modern self-tracking systems can measure our bodies, our minds, and our movements.

    But can they measure our narcissism? The question comes up often enough to require an answer. My original impulse, after I'd heard it three or four times, was to investigate it in the spirit of the self-tracking movement-that is, with a number. There is a well-validated psychological test for measuring narcissism that takes only a few minutes to fill out. I administered it to three dozen self-trackers, and the mean score was 0.38, which is within the normal range. But of course, that's not a real answer, because when people ask whether self-tracking is narcissistic, they're not wondering about clinical narcissism. They're wondering about selfishness, narrowness, a retreat from social engagement and social generosity into an egotistical world of self.

    Oddly, though, self-tracking culture is not particularly individualistic. In fact, there is a strong tendency among self-trackers to share data and collaborate on new ways of using it. People monitoring their diet using Tweet What You Eat! can take advantage of crowdsourced calorie counters; people following their baby's sleep pattern with Trixie Tracker can graph it against those of other children; women watching their menstrual cycle at MyMonthlyCycles can use online tools to match their chart with others'. The most ambitious sites are aggregating personal data for patient-driven drug trials and medical research.

    Self-trackers seem eager to contribute to our knowledge about human life. The world is full of potential experiments: people experiencing some change in their lives, going on or off a diet, kicking an old habit, making a vow or a promise, going on vacation, switching from incandescent to fluorescent lighting, getting into a fight. These are potential experiments, not real experiments, because typically no data is collected and no hypotheses are formed. But with the abundance of self-tracking tools now on offer, everyday changes can become the material of careful study.

    When magnifying lenses were invented, they were aimed at the cosmos. But almost immediately we turned them around and aimed them at ourselves. The telescope became a microscope. We discovered blood cells. We discovered spermatozoa. We discovered the universe of microorganisms inside ourselves. The accessible tools of self-tracking and numerical analysis offer a new kind of microscope with which to find patterns in the smallest unit of sociological analysis, the individual human. But the notion of a personal microscope isn't quite right, because insight will come not just from our own numbers but from combining them with the findings of others. Really, what we're building is what climate scientist Jesse Ausubel calls a macroscope.

    The basic idea of a macroscope is to link myriad bits of natural data into a larger, readable pattern. This means computers on one side and distributed data-gathering on the other. If you want to see the climate, you gather your data with hyperlocal weather stations maintained by amateurs. If you want to see traffic, you collect info from automatic sensors placed on roadways and cars. If you want new insights into yourself, you harness the power of countless observations of small incidents of change-incidents that used to vanish without a trace. And if you want to test an idea about human nature in general, you aggregate those sets of individual observations into a population study.

    The macroscope will be to our era of science what the telescope and the microscope were to earlier ones. Its power will be felt even more from the new questions it provokes than from the answers it delivers. The excitement in the self-tracking movement right now comes not just from the lure of learning things from one's own numbers but also from the promise of contributing to a new type of knowledge, using this tool we all build.

    除非最新型的工具能開發(fā)個(gè)人在生活領(lǐng)域中追蹤的潛能，我們通常很難用定量法衡量。寫日記的人常常把他們的心情記錄在案，日記能準(zhǔn)確反映出他們?cè)��?jīng)逝去的情感。但是有個(gè)問題，這種傳統(tǒng)記錄方法會(huì)使日記的反映有所偏離實(shí)際--你只是在你想記的時(shí)候記。如果你強(qiáng)行制定一個(gè)日程安排表來給你每天同一時(shí)刻的情緒做注釋，你將會(huì)發(fā)現(xiàn)，情緒會(huì)隨著預(yù)期時(shí)間的到來而發(fā)生有規(guī)律的循環(huán)變化。這表明我們不能直接可靠地追蹤我們自身主觀狀態(tài)，不過，社會(huì)學(xué)家在幾年前就已經(jīng)解決了這個(gè)難題：只需要打亂固定的調(diào)查時(shí)間，使調(diào)查隨機(jī)化。 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi和Reed Larson早在1983年就報(bào)道過使用此方法的結(jié)論，并且制定了一個(gè)頗有價(jià)值的心理學(xué)研究線。在那個(gè)時(shí)期，這當(dāng)然是一項(xiàng)由專業(yè)人員進(jìn)行的程式化觀測(cè)工作，你并不清楚該如何對(duì)你自身進(jìn)行隨機(jī)調(diào)查。

    有了今天的技術(shù)后，前述問題變得毫無意義。現(xiàn)在有一個(gè)可對(duì)經(jīng)歷進(jìn)行隨機(jī)抽樣的開放式源碼軟件，它的特點(diǎn)在于已經(jīng)嵌入了一些測(cè)評(píng)工具在其中。比如"快樂因子"測(cè)試，在正文消息里用隨機(jī)的乒乓聲音影響你，然后用臉譜計(jì)算機(jī)應(yīng)用程序指示你的快樂等級(jí)數(shù)。有許多關(guān)于心理健康方面的測(cè)試項(xiàng)目，用不到五分鐘的時(shí)間即可完成，同時(shí)系統(tǒng)會(huì)生成一條關(guān)于你大腦反應(yīng)能力的實(shí)驗(yàn)基線。"共同治病"網(wǎng)站可以讓使用者輸入一系列非常之多的癥狀、征兆和感覺。新式自我追蹤系統(tǒng)可以測(cè)量我們的身體、想法和變動(dòng)。

    但是，他們能否測(cè)出我們的自戀？問題來的那么經(jīng)常以致急切需要答案。我的原始沖動(dòng)，在我知道它三、四遍后早已變成了精神上的自我追蹤活動(dòng)的自我核查--也就是說，with a number.有一個(gè)被廣泛證實(shí)的心理測(cè)試，僅需花幾分鐘即可被感知到是否自戀。我對(duì)36個(gè)自戀者進(jìn)行測(cè)試，平均分?jǐn)?shù)為0.38分，這在正常范圍內(nèi)。當(dāng)然這不見得是真實(shí)答案，因?yàn)楫?dāng)人們被問到自我追蹤是否就是自戀時(shí)，他們對(duì)自戀并不以為怪，相反，他們對(duì)自私、小氣、逃避社會(huì)規(guī)則和以自我為中心現(xiàn)象感到奇怪。

    盡管比較奇怪，自我測(cè)評(píng)文化并不是非常個(gè)人主義。實(shí)際上在自我測(cè)評(píng)者中有相當(dāng)多的人傾向于分享數(shù)據(jù)和采取新的方式合作使用測(cè)評(píng)項(xiàng)目。人們用"瞅瞅你吃的！"來控制飲食，利用crowdsourced卡路里計(jì)算器來幫助他們進(jìn)步；他們用"Trixie 追蹤者"來測(cè)評(píng)他們嬰兒的睡眠方式，以畫出區(qū)別于其他孩子的曲線圖；女士們用"我的月度周期"觀測(cè)她們的月經(jīng)周期，繪圖并聯(lián)機(jī)比較其他人的圖表。測(cè)評(píng)結(jié)果最有價(jià)值的地方在于可匯聚個(gè)人數(shù)據(jù)為致病藥物測(cè)試和醫(yī)學(xué)研究提供幫助。

    自我追蹤似乎熱切希望為人的生命貢獻(xiàn)出集體智慧。世界充滿了潛在實(shí)驗(yàn)：人們?cè)诟髯陨�活中體驗(yàn)著一些變化，繼續(xù)或者放棄日常飲食，打破舊有習(xí)慣，起誓或承諾，繼續(xù)度假，從白熾燈到熒光燈交替變化，投入一場(chǎng)戰(zhàn)斗。這些都是潛在的實(shí)驗(yàn)而并非現(xiàn)實(shí)的，因?yàn)闆]有典型數(shù)據(jù)被收集到，沒有假設(shè)成型。但是，應(yīng)用現(xiàn)有這些龐大的自我追蹤工具，每天的變化將會(huì)變成寶貴的研究資料。

    放大鏡在被發(fā)明后曾被計(jì)劃用來觀測(cè)宇宙。可是我們幾乎立即將其轉(zhuǎn)向?yàn)橛^察我們自身，望遠(yuǎn)鏡變成了顯微鏡。我們發(fā)現(xiàn)了血細(xì)胞，發(fā)現(xiàn)了精子，發(fā)現(xiàn)了我們體內(nèi)環(huán)境中的微生物。這些用來進(jìn)行自我檢測(cè)和數(shù)值分析的便捷工具提供了一種新型顯微鏡，一種用來對(duì)最小型的社會(huì)學(xué)單元--個(gè)體人類進(jìn)行分析的顯微鏡。但是個(gè)人顯微鏡概念并不十分正確，因?yàn)樗�的�?nèi)涵不只來自我們個(gè)體成員的數(shù)據(jù)，還來自發(fā)現(xiàn)并與他人的整合的數(shù)據(jù)。誠然，我們所建立的正是氣候?qū)W家Jesse Ausubel所稱之為的宏觀（macroscope）.

    宏觀的基礎(chǔ)概念是將極多數(shù)量的自然數(shù)據(jù)鏈成更大、更清晰的形式。這意味著一邊是一臺(tái)臺(tái)計(jì)算機(jī)，一邊是分布式數(shù)據(jù)收集系統(tǒng)。如果你想看一下氣候，你可以收集由業(yè)余愛好者提供的hyperlocal天氣數(shù)據(jù)。如果你想了解一下交通，你可以從放置在路面和汽車上的自動(dòng)傳感器上獲取信息。如果你想洞察自身，你可以在數(shù)不清的小事故--通常無影無蹤的小事故--的變化中觀測(cè)數(shù)據(jù)。同樣如果你想測(cè)試普遍人性，你可以匯集很多設(shè)立在種群研究中的個(gè)體觀測(cè)情況。

    就像早期放大鏡和顯微鏡那樣，宏觀將為我們開創(chuàng)科學(xué)新紀(jì)元。它的能量將使它所激發(fā)出來的新問題遠(yuǎn)遠(yuǎn)大于追蹤后給出的答案。使用這個(gè)我們大家共同建立的自我追蹤工具，我們所獲得的興奮不僅來自于能夠獲取其他人的測(cè)試數(shù)據(jù)的吸引力，還來自于我們自己對(duì)這種新學(xué)問所貢獻(xiàn)出的力量。