Mobile phones have many, many purposes: entertainment, art, communication, education. One of the more controversial applications of this technology is using it for monitoring. When certain people have the ability to covertly monitor others while not being monitored themselves, there is a power imbalance. It is possible for those doing the monitoring to judge and punish those who they catch doing something bad when, in fact, this is something that they do themselves but no one is able to observe them doing it. I'm not sure this actually happens all that often or will be as likely to happen in the future as most people believe, but for the time being, let's assume this concern about mobile media as monitoring device is a valid one.
But what about self-monitoring? The possibility of using mobile technology for self-monitoring and self-feedback has not yet been fully realized, and I think it may help people overcome two significant obstacles to behavior change.
The first obstacle is being aware of the patterns in your own behavior: the environmental cues that cause you to unconsciously respond in a way that isn't in your long-term interests, the moods and thoughts that precede worse moods and thoughts. It will be tricky to use mobile tech to reveal these patterns without being too obtrusive. I've tried out some experience sampling technology on my phone and its hard to even get it to work right, and when it does work right, it may just be too much of a nuisance to put up with. It feels like one more thing you have to do, like a diet, and almost all diets fail. But its conceivable that you could design a less intrusive way of tracking thoughts, feelings, and behavior throughout the day.
The second is one I've been thinking about a lot: people do not like to be told what is good for them by others. They may be a bit more accepting of such advice if its coming from a trusted expert (say, a medical doctor), but even then, it doesn't feel good to be told what to do. People will start to look for reasons to doubt the expertise of the advice giver. If we give people the tools to make connections for themselves and to use that new knowledge to alter their choice environment, there is no external force telling them what to do. If anything, they are telling their selves, their future selves, what to do.
We all do this already. We resolve to do things in the future that are in our best long-term interests but then fail to do so in the face of temptation or distraction. Mobile media, because it is with us at all times in all contexts, can be a tool with which we cope with temptation and distraction. Ideally, it will not proscribe particular ways of being, but will merely be a tool for individuals to closely observe and then structure their lives.
Modern existence necessitates being part of an increasingly complex (i.e., hard to understand) set of interactions with an increasing number of people. It is difficult to know why you feel the way you feel, or do the things you do. Designing an unobtrusive, secure self-monitoring application and using it in tandem with some choice-limiting technology is a way to exist in such a society. Potentially, mobile tech is a layer of technology between all those aforementioned applications - entertainment, art, communication, education - and the self who is equipped with the older "technologies" of the brain, eyes, ears, and nose.
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