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开发个人在生活领域中追踪的潜能，我们通常很难用定量法衡量。写日记的人常常把他们的心情记录在案，日记能准确反映出他们曾经逝去的情感。但是有个问题，这种传统记录方法会使日记的反映有所偏离实际--你只是在你想记的时候记。如果你强行制定一个日程安排表来给你每天同一时刻的情绪做注释，你将会发现，情绪会随着预期时间的到来而发生有规律的循环变化。这表明我们不能直接可靠地追踪我们自身主观状态，不过，社会学家在几年前就已经解决了这个难题：只需要打乱固定的调查时间，使调查随机化。 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi和Reed Larson早在1983年就报道过使用此方法的结论，并且制定了一个颇有价值的心理学研究线。在那个时期，这当然是一项由专业人员进行的程式化观测工作，你并不清楚该如何对你自身进行随机调查。

有了今天的技术后，前述问题变得毫无意义。现在有一个可对经历进行随机抽样的开放式源码软件，它的特点在于已经嵌入了一些测评工具在其中。比如"快乐因子"测试，在正文消息里用随机的乒乓声音影响你，然后用脸谱计算机应用程序指示你的快乐等级数。有许多关于心理健康方面的测试项目，用不到五分钟的时间即可完成，同时系统会生成一条关于你大脑反应能力的实验基线。"共同治病"网站可以让使用者输入一系列非常之多的症状、征兆和感觉。新式自我追踪系统可以测量我们的身体、想法和变动。

但是，他们能否测出我们的自恋？问题来的那么经常以致急切需要答案。我的原始冲动，在我知道它三、四遍后早已变成了精神上的自我追踪活动的自我核查--也就是说，with a number.有一个被广泛证实的心理测试，仅需花几分钟即可被感知到是否自恋。我对36个自恋者进行测试，平均分数为0.38分，这在正常范围内。当然这不见得是真实答案，因为当人们被问到自我追踪是否就是自恋时，他们对自恋并不以为怪，相反，他们对自私、小气、逃避社会规则和以自我为中心现象感到奇怪。

尽管比较奇怪，自我测评文化并不是非常个人主义。实际上在自我测评者中有相当多的人倾向于分享数据和采取新的方式合作使用测评项目。人们用"瞅瞅你吃的！"来控制饮食，利用crowdsourced卡路里计算器来帮助他们进步；他们用"Trixie 追踪者"来测评他们婴儿的睡眠方式，以画出区别于其他孩子的曲线图；女士们用"我的月度周期"观测她们的月经周期，绘图并联机比较其他人的图表。测评结果最有价值的地方在于可汇聚个人数据为致病药物测试和医学研究提供帮助。

自我追踪似乎热切希望为人的生命贡献出集体智慧。世界充满了潜在实验：人们在各自生活中体验着一些变化，继续或者放弃日常饮食，打破旧有习惯，起誓或承诺，继续度假，从白炽灯到荧光灯交替变化，投入一场战斗。这些都是潜在的实验而并非现实的，因为没有典型数据被收集到，没有假设成型。但是，应用现有这些庞大的自我追踪工具，每天的变化将会变成宝贵的研究资料。

放大镜在被发明后曾被计划用来观测宇宙。可是我们几乎立即将其转向为观察我们自身，望远镜变成了显微镜。我们发现了血细胞，发现了精子，发现了我们体内环境中的微生物。这些用来进行自我检测和数值分析的便捷工具提供了一种新型显微镜，一种用来对最小型的社会学单元--个体人类进行分析的显微镜。但是个人显微镜概念并不十分正确，因为它的内涵不只来自我们个体成员的数据，还来自发现并与他人的整合的数据。诚然，我们所建立的正是气候学家Jesse Ausubel所称之为的宏观（macroscope）.

宏观的基础概念是将极多数量的自然数据链成更大、更清晰的形式。这意味着一边是一台台计算机，一边是分布式数据收集系统。如果你想看一下气候，你可以收集由业余爱好者提供的hyperlocal天气数据。如果你想了解一下交通，你可以从放置在路面和汽车上的自动传感器上获取信息。如果你想洞察自身，你可以在数不清的小事故--通常无影无踪的小事故--的变化中观测数据。同样如果你想测试普遍人性，你可以汇集很多设立在种群研究中的个体观测情况。

就像早期放大镜和显微镜那样，宏观将为我们开创科学新纪元。它的能量将使它所激发出来的新问题远远大于追踪后给出的答案。使用这个我们大家共同建立的自我追踪工具，我们所获得的兴奋不仅来自于能够获取其他人的测试数据的吸引力，还来自于我们自己对这种新学问所贡献出的力量。