The Internet had long ago turned navel-gazing into an international pastime, but self-tracking takes the self-absorption to a new level. Using elaborate graphs, pie charts, websites and newer technologies, self-trackers catalogue everything in their lives, sometimes with no clear result.

Are self-trackers narcissists? In the video above, from the recent QS Show&Tell, I report on trying to find an answer. Here I give a quick summary of that talk and a reference link. I decided to run this test because a few weeks ago Alexandra Carmichael made a detailed and helpful report on her self-tracking project. Sandy Lane made the following comment:

Does it measure your narcissism too?

Messina and Evans prefer the term "data junkies," spoken with the self-effacing self-awareness that comes from months of meticulous self-study.

Self-trackers like Messina and Evans could spend hours online, charting, analyzing, tracking. Life as a series of pure, distilled data points, up for interpretation.