Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly have been documenting an emerging phenomenon they call “the quantified self“. The term refers to a set experiments that people are conducting – primarily on themselves – to understand their own bodies and behavior. In an article for The New York Times Magazine, Wolf details a range of these experiments. One engineer weans himself off coffee and compares his reported levels of concentration with and without caffeine. Others use sensors like the Zeo to track their sleep patterns, or the Fitbit to track physical activity. Some track what they eat and drink, how much they weigh, their emotional states.

Wolf acknowledges that some of the people profiled in the article sound obsessive and notes that people engaged in detailed self-tracking may be “outliers”. And he’s careful to offer testimonies from people who engaged in self-tracking and gave it up, feeling like the data they generated was relentless and remorseless. (As someone who’s had to engage in self-tracking of blood glucose levels as a type 1 diabetic for the past 25 years, “relentless and remorseless” are my words, not Wolf’s.) But he’s clearly a believer that tracking can be a tool for self-discovery, a way of learning what constitutes normal behavior for each of us, not just a tool for moving towards a goal, like increased fitness or better sleep.

The experiment in self-tracking that I’m considering is more about self knowledge than self improvement, though I’m finding it’s hard to separate the two. I’m looking for ways to monitor my personal information flow. I’d like to understand how I get information about the world – through television, the web, radio, email and the people I talk to. The hope is to use myself as a guinea pig, to see what’s possible as far as active and passive monitoring of information flows, in the hope of opening the experiment to a wider population.

I’ve made the case – in my recent TED talk and elsewhere – that many of us overestimate the amount of diverse, international information we encounter through the internet and other communications networks. We run the danger of being “imaginary cosmopolitans”, convinced we’re encountering information from all corners of the world, while we might be trapped in homogeneous echo chambers.

There’s some data to support this theory, both from experiments colleagues and I have been carrying out looking at cosmopolitan and parochial consumption of media online, and there are terrific analyses like Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart’s “Cosmopolitan Communications“, which looks at vast data sets about communication flows across borders. But I’ve not been able to find much information that compares the media diets of individuals at a level that allows me to answer questions like, “What percentage of news encountered is local, national and international, on average? What media is most likely to make an individual seek out more information – a mainstream media story, a citizen media post or a personal recommendation?

Responding to an earlier blog post of mine, my friend David Sasaki proposed an experiment: keep a communications diary that tracked interactions via different media. If I’m going to argue that people’s uses of the Internet are disproportionately domestic, it would be good to compare those online interactions to other media. Sure, 90% of my Facebook interactions might be domestic, but perhaps that vastly outpaces my face to face interactions – that might then be an argument that the Internet is, on balance, more likely to help us interact with people from different nations (different religions, different political perspectives, take your pick) than other technologies.

Media diaries aren’t new – take an intro communications class at many universities, and you’re likely to be asked to keep one. They tend to be pretty superficial – it requires some serious obsessiveness to log the individual stories you encounter, rather than writing down “NPR – 7am – 7:20am. And the process of keeping a diary tends to shape your behavior – for the month Rachel and I were a Nielsen family (years back), we watched vastly more public television than we do in an average month.

It’s easier than ever to keep a diary with tools like Your Flowing Data, a Twitter-based service that allows you to send direct messages via the web or SMS. I just logged “d yfd listened WNNZ 0750 – 0830″, a syntax that I hope will let me start collecting information on what media I encounter offline, and who I interact with in the real world.

But what I really want is data on the dozen or more stories I heard on NPR during that morning drive – coding each in terms of subject and geography would mean either logging while driving or writing a tool that turns the name of a broadcast media source and an interval into a stream of metadata. (To a certain extent, this is one of the functions of MediaCloud, but we’re a long way from being able to do this with media that isn’t also creating RSS and Atom feeds.) Furthermore, I know that the process of logging my behavior will influence that behavior. I can already see myself tweeting “d yfd watched football 1130 – 2045″ on Sunday and the accompanying feelings of guilt, shame and, if the Packers lose, frustration.

Logging my media diet is clearly going to involve some diary work, but it would be great if I could automate collection as much as possible, both to minimize the time requirements and the influence logging will have on my behavior. And, if this is an experiment I hope others will repeat, logging needs to be as automatic as possible. So I’ve been looking for tools that will log and analyze my online behavior transparently.

My friend and colleague Judith Donath was responsible for a number of early tools designed to allow self-monitoring of email use, including Themail, developed with her student (and now, world-leading designer) Fernanda Viegas, Themail. I asked her advice on locating appropriate self-tracking tools to understand how I’m getting information through email, the web, Twitter and other media. Her suggestion: look at productivity tools.

Good advice. Most of the tools I’d been finding to track web use either are designed to allow bosses to monitor their workers or spouses to read each others’ email. Judith’s advice led me to Rescue Time, an amazing package that monitors everything you do on your computer… and nags you when it perceives you to be wasting time. I may break down and turn off the messages that urge me to account for every five minutes of inactivity, but I’m finding the ability to track what applications I’m using to be hugely helpful, if slightly dispiriting.

A week in the life with RescueTime

Apparently, I spent roughly twice as much time answering email as I do anything else. Writing (BBedit) comes in second place, though I apparently spend almost half as much time on Twitter as I do writing. And while I’d likely tell you I get most of my important news from Global Voices, The New York Times and Foreign Policy’s Passport, the logs tell the tale of my secret shame: a need to view every single goofy image posted on Reddit.

While RescueTime does a lovely job of presenting this information, I find myself looking longingly at the data collected by Eyebrowse, a project from Brennan Moore, Max Van Kleek and David Karger at MIT computer science. Eyebrowse is a Firefox plugin that grabs URL information on every page you browse and offers the option to report the data linked to a profile or a set of demographics. The profiles are far more revealing than I’d personally be comfortable with – it’s one thing to know that I’m a sucker for Metafilter, another to see every Javascript function call Karger looks up. My dream tool grabs the data Eyebrowse does, analyzes it and presents it at the level of granularity RescueTime offers.

Mail Trends visualizes the top ten people I receive email from.

That’s not an easy balance to strike. I’ve been looking at mail analysis tools as well, since Themail no longer exists. Mail Trends gets the job done… if you’re a GMail user and if you don’t mind mucking about on the command line. (It’s a very elegant Python script, which needs the Cheetah templating library. In my experience, it chokes when I try to feed it more than 100,000 emails, but works like a champ on 50,000 or so.) Mail Trends does a great job in offering a topline summary – I now know that my primary research collaborator sends me roughly twice as much email as my wife… which may or may not tell me something helpful about both relationships. But it’s not able to tell me what URLs I follow within emails and which I ignore, data that I’d need to understand how I get information from mailing lists and individuals. My guess is that a tool specific enough to track the URLs I read would be almost unusable in terms of showing the overall patterns of email usage.

A map of who I follow on Twitter. (via MMMeeja)

I’m having similar problems figuring out how to analyze Twitter. Tweetstats offers insights on who I retweet and who I reply to – good indicators of who I read closely within the set of 585 people I follow. And MMMeeja provides a pretty map of those 585 who have provided information about their location, letting me see that I follow a lot of Africans and not many South Americans. Again, what I’d really like is something that collected every URL presented to me via Twitter and tracked which ones I follow and which I ignore. Ditto for Facebook, though I use it lots less.

So – here are my open questions:

- What are tools I’ve not yet found that solve some of the problems I’ve described here? Is there a good tool that can turn an interval of radio or television into a stream of story metadata? Has anyone developed a tool that tracks every URL I encounter across applications and examines whether I’ve followed it?

- Has anyone come up with a way to make offline media tracking easier to do? Something like Shazam, which could listen to radio or television with me and tell me what stories I’m hearing? A microformat for tracking conversations with individuals?

- If I want anyone else to participate in this project – and I do -what’s the right balance between the overbroad and the spookily specific? If I’m not willing to start using Eyebrowse, what level of specificity is the right one? Your top eight sites, as Chrome present to you? The aggregate data of RescueTime? A world map that shows how often different corners of the world are presented to you in the course of a month?

- To make the process of media self-monitoring worth engaging in, there needs to be a reward, either in terms of self-knowledge or self-improvement. What sorts of knowledge would make you willing to participate in an experiment like this? Are there behaviors that you’d like to change that such an experiment would help you identify and address? Or have I simply descended too deep into the realm of the obsessive outlier?

This post originally appeared on Ethan’s excellent personal blog my heart’s in accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 11:45 AM)

Stefan Wolff is a scholar of ethnic conflicts and civil war. He tells us that, while there’s seldom good news when we talk about these topics, there are reasons for hope. Specifically, he’s hopeful about three factors: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design.

There are certainly reasons to worry about ongoing civil war. Wolff reminds us of recent civil conflicts in Georgia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Israel and Palestine, Darfur and Iraq. But there’s good news as well. In the long term, there’s been an overall decline in the number of civil wars, and we’re seeing roughly half as many as there were in the 1990s, with fifty civil wars. Death rates are lower from combat casualties, though the trend is less unambiguous. And there’s a decrease of 2/3rds in civilian casualties, which is great, but those statistics don’t consider the tragically common other effects of conflict on civilians – torture, rape and maiming.

So why is the situation getting better? Sometimes there’s a military victory, like with the victory of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. But these rarely show up as resounding successes. Wolff tells us an African colleague once told him, “The ceasefire on Tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on Wednesday morning.”

Looking at success stories might help us. The Northern Ireland peace process mediated by Senator Mitchell was a resounding success and has led to lasting peace in Northern Ireland. There were very clear conditions for participation in negotiation – a firm commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Agreements were innovative and let all parties see their core concerns addressed. People built cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and acknowledge Irish dimension of the conflict. There was an acknowledgment of rights of individuals and groups, and local leaders rose to the challenge of compromise.

This isn’t the only success – stopping the civil war in Liberia, preventing civil war in Macedonia, and ending the conflict in Aceh – in each case, institutions have stood up to the promise of making peace instead of sustaining conflict.

Why didn’t Oslo work as a process for peace in Israel and Palestine? The process didn’t include enough of the issues – instead, it left them to local leaders, who soon disengaged, became distracted. The Southern Sudan peace process wasn’t comprehensive enough, and may lead to resumption of conflict.

In Kosovo, failure of a negotiated solution led to de facto partition. Here we should probably blame the intransigence of local leaders, and the failure to settle for less than full demands. Western support for Kosovar independents probably didn’t help either, and the failure to build institutions to address concerns of Serbs and Albanians alike contributed.

Even when situations less than optimal, Wolff tells us, leaders have a choice and can make a difference for the better. A cold peace is better than a hot war for everyone involved. But these sorts of solutions don’t happen automatically. Leadership has to be capable, determined, visionary. Leaders need to connect to each other and to followers, so they can bring them along on a long and arduous journey.

Diplomacy must be well resourced, sustained, and a use a mix of pressures. It needs to push for equitable compromise, and involve a broad coalition of local, regional and international supporters.

Institutional design should focus on issues, innovative thinking, and be supported by well-funded implementation.

Parties involved need to move away from maximum demands, towards compromise. And we all need to invest in developing leaders who have the skills, vision, determination to make peace so that “the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow.”

This post originally appeared on Ethan’s excellent blog My Heart’s in Accra.

Image of Stefan Wolff via his website.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Nonviolence at 1:00 PM)

WWF’s Here are my notes on that longer talk, which Clay was kind enough to vet and correct…)

This post originally appeared on Ethan’s excellent blog My Heart’s in Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Sustainable Development at 12:00 PM)

Johan Rockstrom with SP Wani during a field visit at ICRISAT-Patancheru. (photo credit)

Ecologist Johan Rockström begins by reminding us modern humans have just experienced “10,000 years of grace,” an interglacial period capable of supporting human development. He tells us we’re currently putting the planet into a “quadruple squeeze” through pressures of human growth and inequality (80% of climate impact from 20% of people), climate change (whether we end up at 350/450/550ppm of CO2), ecosystem loss (loss of 60% of species), and the problem of surprise – rapid tipping points.

Rockström tells us that may be at a point where humans are the main pressure on the planet. It’s not just CO2 that maps a hockey stick – methane, nitrous oxide, loss of species, ozone depletion all have a distinctive, rapidly rising curve. There was a massive acceleration on those curves in the 1950s. And it’s possible that we currently face the most challenging decade in human history, a decade where we have to “bend the curves”.

Natural systems have stable states and thresholds. Think of a ball rolling on a curved surface. One measure of resilience is the depth of the cup. But when the ball reaches a local maximum, it can quickly tip into another state (as he says this, he steps off the stage, lands on his feet after a few foot fall, and continues his talk without breaking stride.)

Systems can collapse very quickly. Coral reef systems can turn from thriving ecosystems to systems that have lost diversity very quickly. We may have just seen a possible threshold in the arctic – we rapidly lost 30% of reflective ice cover. This is the largest red flag warning for humanity, he tells us.

Nine factors, and their interactions, serve as “planetary boundaries”: climate change, ozone depletion, aerosol loading, ocean acidification, freshwater use, chemical pollution, land system change, rate of biodiversity loss, bio-geochemical loading, and global nitrogen and phosphorous cycles. Rockström tells us that we’ve crossed the boundary on three of these factors – nitrogen flow, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

Is sustainable development utopia? No – we can fix this – there’s evidence we can. In Latin America, collapsed farmland was recovered through zero-till, mulch-based farming. The Great Barrier Reed, which was beginning to collapse, has now been revived due to a new governance strategy, and there’s a new focus on putting redundancies and diversity in the natural system. In Sweden, swamplands that were considered worthless flood zones are now being reincorporated into urban planning.

We face the largest transformative development since industrialization. But he argues that we can manage it if we build resilient systems.

This post originally appeared on Ethan’s excellent blog My Heart’s in Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Sustainable Development at 11:30 AM)

Peter Eigen, the founder of Transparency International, warns us that our governance systems are failing us in the face of a globalized economy. We can see evidence of this failing governance: billions of poor, hungry, people without access to sanitation. And we can see that some problems are beyond the reach of national or multinational governance: the image of a helpless Obama at a oil-covered beach, a helpless Ban Ki Moon at a refugee camp.

Eigen was World Bank director for East Africa and discovered that many of the best things he tried to do were destroyed by corruption. He was trying to understand why the worst thought-out projects – massive infrastructure projects that had little chance of success and terrible environmental impacts – seemed to go ahead first. These projects often were rejected by the donor community, but they were pushed through by powerful kleptocrats within governments. As Eigen worked to reveal this corruption, he was censured by his bosses at the World Bank, who objected to his “romantic, unprofessional work” on exposing corruption.

The uncomfortable truth is that most countries that were members of the World Bank felt that corruption was okay. German companies paid many millions in bribes, systematically, and over long periods of time. Indeed, the practice was so well established that bribes were tax deductible under German law. Worldwide, roughly 1 trillion was paid a year in bribes.

So Eigen left the World Bank in protest and started Transparency International. He tells us that the lessons learned in starting the project have implications for other issues, like the work Auret Van Heerden is doing on global supply chains. As with the supply chain, there’s a real danger that as you stop permitting bribery, you’ll get out competed by countries that do permit it. You have to overcome this prisoner’s dilemma by cooperating with businesses. Eigen advocates “antagonistic cooperation” – using a term his wife, a prominent political scientist coined. In Germany, he explained that in the first meetings, no one was willing to admit that they paid bribes. In the second, everyone admitted they did, and in the third meeting, they all agreed to change. This was especially amazing because the government explicitly didn’t apply pressure, and believed that bribery was necessary to keep German business competitive.

Transparency International now provides tools to make it easier to escape the prisoner’s dilemma. The Corruption Perception Index is one tool, as is the fact that TI now has presences in 130 countries and national chapters dedicated to tackling corruption.

The challenge he’s focused on now is adding transparency to extractive industries. Abundant, easily accessible resources tend to lead towards corruption, because the opportunities are simply so tempting. So EITI is working with the biggest mining and oil companies of the world, the governments of nations dependent on extractive industries, and civil societies. Four countries have committed to a very high set of standards – Azerbaijan, Liberia, Mongolia, Norway – and others are on their way towards compliance.

The magic of this process, Eigan tells us is the interaction of government, corporation and civil society – it’s a magical triangle to lead to a better world. But all participants – including civil society – need to become more participatory and transparent.

This post originally appeared on Ethan’s excellent blog My Heart’s in Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transparency and Human Rights at 2:00 PM)