In short, Reality Mining is about using smart phones to record the interaction of a user with his device and the interaction of the user with other cell phone users. By analyzing this data, patterns of behavior can be extracted that can potentially be interesting to social researchers. For more information on Reality Mining see here.
What made me start this blog was the following question: If there could be a way to capture -and thus record- what a person feels, thinks and otherwise experiences everyday, what kind of patterns might emerge from analyzing this information? I think that this is one step (or even more steps) further from Reality Mining. What would happen if this kind of information was recorded for a vast amount of people and then analyzed? What if we could predict how thoughts we make and what we experience might affect our life later on and the decisions we will make? This is full-blown ‘Life Mining’.
I get some e-mails from readers on “how this life analytics project is going” and for this subject there will be some future posts very soon.
