Self Tracking: Interesting, but not so great
Self tracking isn’t really something I place a lot of importance on. When I remember to open the app on my phone called “Pacer,” I’m not really impressed to see it tell me how many steps I’ve walked today. I’m more curious than anything.
The Pacer app is a fitness, self tracking app and I originally downloaded it because I was curious about how many steps I was taking in a day. The app uses GPS and motion sensors to track how many steps you’re taking each day, how many calories that equates to, how many miles that equates to, and how much total time you’ve spent walking. The app allows you to set a fitness goal based on your weight with a suggested amount of steps you should be taking each day to reach that goal. The app will rank and compare your days of the week based on how active you were. There are also suggested fitness programs within the app such as a program to “walk off fat quickly.” Each program has a certain number of workouts in its circuit and runs anywhere from six to eight weeks. To access any other programs, you have to pay for an upgrade within the app.
To use the app and set your fitness goal, you have to put in your age, gender, weight, and how much weight you’d like to lose over a period of time. Your fitness goal is set by this data and only needs to be put in once, but you can update your weight and goal at any time. There is a walking/running function button where you press start and for the duration of your run/walk, a gps maps out your route so you can see, geographically, how far you’ve gone. I don’t use this function though.
The app suggests having different fitness goals that are connected to its programs like the “walk off fat quickly” program. This would encourage the user to use the built-in features. It also suggests putting in standard goals like “ab workout” that the app will give you reminder notifications to work on in your own time.
I’m not sure what the future of this app would be, but I think it’d be an effective way for people to track their level of fitness.
Every now and then after having a day with a higher count of steps, the app will suggest posting my steps to Facebook. I don’t like this function and wish the app didn’t include it because I don’t care for all my friends to see its data.
I don’t really like self tracking. It doesn’t necessarily make me feel happier if I walk more on certain days, but it definitely makes me feel worse about myself when I don’t come anywhere close to my daily goal. I’m curious about my steps, but I don’t like how easy it is to become obsessive about it. That’s why I don’t open the app too often. I really don’t care to see other people’s progress on social media and I find their information irrelevant. It just seems like they’re bragging to me.
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I agree with you on your opinion of self-tracking on social media. I’m not really interested in seeing other people’s self-tracking data, nor am I interested in sharing that data with people on Facebook. In a way, I can see it being a motivation for others, but I think in reality seeing other people achieving their goals in fitness would make me feel bad about how little I time I put into working out.
It is difficult to get with self tracking if it doesn’t feel right. I can understand where you’re coming from about how it makes you feel different about your happiness if you don’t meet the “goal” on the app. I like the idea of self awareness, doing what you want based on how it makes you feel. Not based on what others or an app assumes you’re supposed to feel.
I love that you mentioned your discomfort with sharing your information from Pacer onto Facebook; and I especially love how this app will suggest that “after a few days.” It feels like the app is sort of humanized in a weird way because it sort of seems as though the app wants to do some bragging for the person using it. Not wanting to share that data is something that I think is very popular among our age demographic. I wonder if that is because we are in this in between generation where we know what it is like to have little-to-no data sharing and then a HUGE emphasis on sharing our data. Some of us are so happy, so willing to contribute to a larger pool of data; some of us are not. Some of us are not even considering what it means to “share” data, even something as simple as our daily steps.
Also, I wonder if, having learned more about the Quantified Self and its relation to big data, you might be even less willing to share certain information to Facebook and other social media sites?