Here is a log of all the data points I created and collected on February 20th, 2018:
With digital devices:
- Digitally scanned my fingerprint several times using the touchID on my iPhone to unlock the device
- Connected to 3 different Wi-Fi networks
- I performed several taps and scrolls using apps on my iPhone
- Plugged a USB to USB-C adapters to my Macbook 6 times
- I visited more than 100 websites, 12 of them are new websites (never visited before). This generated around 14 tabs using Chrome.
- I skipped several ads on different platforms (especially on Youtube)
- Talked on iMessage with 3 different people and exchanged around 30 messages with them
- Played around 100 songs on Spotify
- Received 21 emails and sent 9 emails
With humans/world:
- Trash I have generated in the environment
- Executed a vast amount of social interactions with people (in the Media Lab, the restaurant…)
- Performed eye contact with another person several times
- Consumed oxygen and generated breathed out carbon dioxide
With Myself (I understand my thoughts as data points):
- Asked myself if I am happy at MIT twice
- Thought “What am I doing in this meeting?” around 6 times
It is very hard to collect and quantify all types of data we generate every day. Everything that exists can be analyzed, e.g.: Heart rate, the pressure applied to the ground with our feet…
The key questions are “What do we want to learn?” and “How can we learn that?”. Collecting data for the sake of collecting data is… somehow unethical and a waste of resources. At the same time, I understand that future technology might benefit from every single type of data collected in the past.