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個人在生活領域中追蹤的潛能，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，日記能準確反映出他們曾經逝去的情感。但是有個問題，這種傳統記錄方法會使日記的反映有所偏離實際--你只是在你想記的時候記。如果你強行制定一個日程安排表來給你每天同一時刻的情緒做注釋，你將會發現，情緒會隨著預期時間的到來而發生有規律的循環變化。這表明我們不能直接可靠地追蹤我們自身主觀狀態，不過，社會學家在幾年前就已經解決了這個難題：只需要打亂固定的調查時間，使調查隨機化。 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi和Reed Larson早在1983年就報道過使用此方法的結論，并且制定了一個頗有價值的心理學研究線。在那個時期，這當然是一項由專業人員進行的程式化觀測工作，你并不清楚該如何對你自身進行隨機調查。

    有了今天的技術后，前述問題變得毫無意義。現在有一個可對經歷進行隨機抽樣的開放式源碼軟件，它的特點在于已經嵌入了一些測評工具在其中。比如"快樂因子"測試，在正文消息里用隨機的乒乓聲音影響你，然后用臉譜計算機應用程序指示你的快樂等級數。有許多關于心理健康方面的測試項目，用不到五分鐘的時間即可完成，同時系統會生成一條關于你大腦反應能力的實驗基線。"共同治病"網站可以讓使用者輸入一系列非常之多的癥狀、征兆和感覺。新式自我追蹤系統可以測量我們的身體、想法和變動。

    但是，他們能否測出我們的自戀？問題來的那么經常以致急切需要答案。我的原始沖動，在我知道它三、四遍后早已變成了精神上的自我追蹤活動的自我核查--也就是說，with a number.有一個被廣泛證實的心理測試，僅需花幾分鐘即可被感知到是否自戀。我對36個自戀者進行測試，平均分數為0.38分，這在正常范圍內。當然這不見得是真實答案，因為當人們被問到自我追蹤是否就是自戀時，他們對自戀并不以為怪，相反，他們對自私、小氣、逃避社會規則和以自我為中心現象感到奇怪。

    盡管比較奇怪，自我測評文化并不是非常個人主義。實際上在自我測評者中有相當多的人傾向于分享數據和采取新的方式合作使用測評項目。人們用"瞅瞅你吃的！"來控制飲食，利用crowdsourced卡路里計算器來幫助他們進步；他們用"Trixie 追蹤者"來測評他們嬰兒的睡眠方式，以畫出區別于其他孩子的曲線圖；女士們用"我的月度周期"觀測她們的月經周期，繪圖并聯機比較其他人的圖表。測評結果最有價值的地方在于可匯聚個人數據為致病藥物測試和醫學研究提供幫助。

    自我追蹤似乎熱切希望為人的生命貢獻出集體智慧。世界充滿了潛在實驗：人們在各自生活中體驗著一些變化，繼續或者放棄日常飲食，打破舊有習慣，起誓或承諾，繼續度假，從白熾燈到熒光燈交替變化，投入一場戰斗。這些都是潛在的實驗而并非現實的，因為沒有典型數據被收集到，沒有假設成型。但是，應用現有這些龐大的自我追蹤工具，每天的變化將會變成寶貴的研究資料。

    放大鏡在被發明后曾被計劃用來觀測宇宙。可是我們幾乎立即將其轉向為觀察我們自身，望遠鏡變成了顯微鏡。我們發現了血細胞，發現了精子，發現了我們體內環境中的微生物。這些用來進行自我檢測和數值分析的便捷工具提供了一種新型顯微鏡，一種用來對最小型的社會學單元--個體人類進行分析的顯微鏡。但是個人顯微鏡概念并不十分正確，因為它的內涵不只來自我們個體成員的數據，還來自發現并與他人的整合的數據。誠然，我們所建立的正是氣候學家Jesse Ausubel所稱之為的宏觀（macroscope）.

    宏觀的基礎概念是將極多數量的自然數據鏈成更大、更清晰的形式。這意味著一邊是一臺臺計算機，一邊是分布式數據收集系統。如果你想看一下氣候，你可以收集由業余愛好者提供的hyperlocal天氣數據。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傳感器上獲取信息。如果你想洞察自身，你可以在數不清的小事故--通常無影無蹤的小事故--的變化中觀測數據。同樣如果你想測試普遍人性，你可以匯集很多設立在種群研究中的個體觀測情況。

    就像早期放大鏡和顯微鏡那樣，宏觀將為我們開創科學新紀元。它的能量將使它所激發出來的新問題遠遠大于追蹤后給出的答案。使用這個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試數據的吸引力，還來自于我們自己對這種新學問所貢獻出的力量。