Call it narcissism if you like. Of the myriad subjects available to us in print for our edification, understanding, and entertainment, nothing grabs our attention quite like reading about ourselves. One of the hallmarks of a reasonably functional adult life is a clear sense of identity - by the time we’re out on our own we ought to have a pretty good idea of who we are and what we want - but few of us actually have that, hence the multibillion-dollar self-help industry. We return again and again to psychology, philosophy, Dr. Phil, Miss Cleo, and the Cosmo Quiz looking for clues to ourselves and instructions on what the hell to do next. Perhaps my favorite conceit is popular astrology, the notion that the silent, majestic movement of countless stars and planets through a vast universe over billions of years has occurred for the sole purpose of informing us whether today is a good day to get a pedicure.

While we schlep around from guru to guru trying to figure ourselves out, some people have made careers out of trying to figure out everybody else - as consumers, voters, patients and victims. This week I examine a couple of new books about the daunting task of discovering how to stuff six billion people into various boxes.

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Stepping Up and Falling Down: As the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks came and went, and people gathered at the crash sites for the reading of the names of the victims, it behooved us to reflect not only on who died on that day but why they died. We have enough survivors’ accounts and forensic evidence to tell us that while many of the people inside the towers and the Pentagon and on board the doomed airliners acted with selfless heroism and common sense, the greater number of the victims died through panic, through inaction, and through just plain not knowing what to do. Many, including appointed fire marshals on each floor of the towers, had no idea where the fire exits were and had never been in the stairwells of their own workplaces. Many headed for the roof, not knowing that those doors were locked. Many simply stayed in their offices and continued to work, in utter, inexplicable denial of the event that would kill them.

Amanda Ripley, who covers homeland security issues for Time magazine, examines the events of 9/11 and other catastrophic events through the eyes (and minds) of ordinary people on the scene in her fascinating book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (Random House, 2008). By focusing on the responses of people, as individuals and in groups, caught up in sudden life-or-death situations, Ripley attempts to show us the various ways our minds respond to high stress and the needs of survival, and her conclusions are nothing short of amazing.

Ripley takes us into the heart of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting spree as witnessed by the one student in his classroom who escaped being shot by playing possum. She talks to the survivors of the hellish fire that consumed the lavish Beverly Hills Supper Club in Cincinnati in 1977, wherein most of the patrons who perished did so because they waited to be told what to do in a fire. She dissects the now regular stampedes during the hajj in Saudi Arabia and the crash of an airliner into the freezing Potomac River in 1982, where crowds simply watched as passengers dogpaddled for their lives.

In looking at all of these cases, Ripley breaks down our reaction to catastrophe into a formula: denial, deliberation and decision. Many of us get hung up during one or another of these phases, and many of us succumb to the wrong impulses, panicking instead of acting calmly, or freezing into inaction rather than saving ourselves. Through supplemental interviews with psychiatrists, risk experts and emergency managers, Ripley shows that our responses to crisis depend upon many factors, some social, some psychological, some even biological. She points out how heroism runs contrary to the survival instinct and why, therefore, we are more likely to be victims than the heroes we all imagine ourselves becoming when disaster overtakes us.

She also provides excellent resources and advice on steps we can take to override our panic response, and makes an excellent case for the responsibility of our leaders to better prepare the citizenry to face disaster at the same time they outfit police, firefighters and paramedics. Our so-called first responders are never actually that - it is those in the thick of it who can, and must, respond first to save themselves and their neighbors. The Unthinkable is an invaluable tool to help us to accomplish that end.

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Like Earthworms on a Tray: If one wished to build a profile on me, based on my spending and computer use on the day I write this column, one would conclude that a.) I have a fondness for frozen pizza and Coke Zero; b.) I am a news and politics junkie, a baseball fan and a movie geek; c.) I don’t post very often on my blog, but I read my friends’ blogs obsessively; and d.) that it’s highly likely that my eyeballs are going to fall out of my head from staring at monitors for approximately 12 hours today. If you are, therefore, a movie studio, a liberal political party, an eyewear manufacturer, or Pizza Hut, it would seem that I’m your man. Come and get me.

As we become more and more dependent upon technology to do business, keep in touch, entertain ourselves, and stave off any glimmer of inconvenience in our lives, we are also providing minute-by-minute details to teams of mathematicians and marketers seeking to profile us according to our wants and needs, preferences and prejudices. Grocery stores track your purchases through those loyalty cards you use, and spit out coupons for things you like to entice you to come back. Internet cookies and spyware assess the sites you visit and how long you linger there, and send you ads tailored to your apparent tastes in online shopping and porn. Politicians employ armies of geeks to calculate which issues matter most to your highly specialized demographic and custom-fit their messages to you. You may not feel like a number, but rest assured, somewhere out there someone has dissected, codified, filed and reduced you to a set of statistics and is selling you wholesale to anyone looking for a potential customer.

Paranoid yet? If not, then Stephen Baker’s book The Numerati (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) will get you there. Baker, a longtime business journalist, set out to explore the world of data mining, and his findings are startling. Through hundreds of interviews he examines the breadth and reach of the subterranean industry in mathematical information gathering and the various ways in which we are and will be summed up. Starting with the world of business, where computer use surveillance helps determine which employees are most and least productive, Baker takes us to the grocery store, where various chains record our purchases and attempt to upsell to us with data-driven “smart carts.” He shows us the 10 distinct personality types into which we’ve all been slotted by political pollsters watching our spending choices and TV-watching habits. And he shows us how new programs monitor our blogs for word frequency and contextual cues in order to determine how we feel about products, entertainment and world events.

Not that everything in Baker’s book leans toward the sinister. Baker also illustrates how data mining enables strides in the medical and public health sectors, from planting biological scanners in cattle to track Mad Cow disease to advances in home monitoring systems for the ill and elderly. One particularly interesting innovation is technology that can monitor the progress of Alzheimer’s disease by measuring changes in the patient’s speech patterns on the phone. Doctors assemble data profiles on patients in hopes of anticipating future ailments and degenerative conditions, and Baker presents an evenhanded overview of the debate between the medical community and privacy advocates over whether such mining is vital or intrusive.

Every day it becomes harder to stay off the grid, but at the very least we can gain a deeper understanding of just what is being done with the steady stream of information we provide data miners on a daily basis. Baker’s book gives a nice overview of the situation, in an engaging layman’s style that is part anthropology, part gee-whiz pop-culture reporting, and entirely accessible.

John G. Nettles