The quantified self: what will life be like when every aspect of your existence is as easy to access as the latest Lady Gaga single?

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Column

WE TREAT EVEN OUR most mundane lunches as if they were corpses at a crime scene. We photograph them from every angle, update friends, family, and intimate strangers on Facebook with the most salient facts about the chipotle remoulade, then file more detailed reports at Yelp. Instead of just hollering at our TV, we share our jokes about Mitt Romney's debate attire with the rest of the world on Twitter. We review our friends' reviews about the latest newspaper headlines on TumbIr. All of this over-sharing helps marketers, potential bosses, and sometimes even our loved ones know us a little more intimately. But how much of the data we carpet bomb the universe with daily actually comes back to us in the form of self-knowledge?

Sure, using the fossil records you've left at Flickr, blogspot.com, and various other digital tar pits, you may be able to recreate exactly how you spent, say, March 11, 2008. But think about the sort of information that might truly define you and offer a glimpse into your soul. Does the amount of money you've spent on Coke Zero over the last five years equal or exceed your current credit card debt? Do you spend more time complaining about how much you have to clean up after your roommate than you do cleaning up after your roommate ? When is your mood consistently higher--after shopping or after church?

When trying to answer questions like that, you may find that you have no more insight into yourself than, say, a person from 1991. Twenty years, or maybe just 20 months from now, that won't be the case. Already, a small but growing number of people are using a small but growing number of devices and apps to meticulously monitor and record their vital signs, their moods, their locations, their physical activities, their financial transactions, in ways that go far beyond the ephemeral "likes" and lulz of online lives. In 2008, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly and Wired contributing editor Gary Wolf noticed this trend toward self-tracking and created a website called The Quantified Self to document it. The site has since spawned meet-up groups in 23 cities around the world where individuals convene to talk about what sort of data they're amassing on themselves, and--one imagines--to take copious notes.

To some degree, we all self-track. We step on a scale, we jot diary entries in Moleskines, we may even keep fairly comprehensive logs of the miles we cycle or run and the calories we burn in the process. But just as channel-surfing...