Big Data in your blood

I talked about how data is becoming more and more intimate before. Information is becoming increasingly more personal and intuitive and information technology literally gets under our skin. On the 7^th of September journalist Quentin Hardy published an article “Big Data in Your Blood” in the New York Times. In this article he describes the following: “Very soon, we will see inside ourselves like never before, with wearable, even internal, sensors that monitor even our most intimate biological processes. It is likely to happen even before we figure out the etiquette and laws around sharing this knowledge.” All kinds of wearables like the Nike+ FuelBand and the Fitbit are going to track our daily activitities. A company called Proteus has even developed a pill with a sensor in it. Just swallow it, and it will immediately measure the inner parts of your body. This week the Quantified Self 2012 conference took place. One of the speakers was futurist Kevin Kelly. He talked about the upcoming Quantified Century. One of his remarks was that we are redefining ourSelves. We are developing all kinds of exosenses because of all these new informationtechnologies. And these exosenses are sensations instead of data. It all reminds me of a famous quote by Marshall McLuhan: “All media are extensions of some human faculty. Mental or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot. Book is an extension of the eye. Clothing is an extension of the skin. Electric circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system. The extension of anyone’s sense, displaces the other senses and  alters the way we think. The way we see the world and ourselves. When these changes are made, men change.” Is Big Data really changing the human species?