Mobile media revealing our selves to ourselves

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.

Portable Technology: Size, Time, & Weight

My new computer - a netbook - has me thinking about how the physical characteristics of a device can influence how I feel about it and then what I do with it. I'm not talking about technological affordance - what the software/hardware allow me to do - but rather how the size and weight of the object influence my feelings about it.

My first working hypothesis: the smaller the device, the more "handy" it is, the more it will be suited for short bursts of use. Its hard to bust out anything bigger than my hand when I'm on the go, on a bus or walking around campus. Also, the use of these smaller devices for longer periods of time seems somehow fatiguing. Trying to block out all this other sensory information while concentrating on a smaller screen for a prolonged period of time is more difficult than concentrating on a larger laptop screen. For these reasons, smaller devices = shorter duration of use sessions.

Then I thought about whether weight has anything to do with use. I don't bring my laptop everywhere I bring my netbook b/c of the weight of my laptop. Its not so much that its literally too heavy for me to carry, but that it feels burdensome. I'm constantly reminded that its in my backpack. If I had a super light MacBook Air, I might feel better about bringing it more places b/c I wouldn't feel burdened by its presence.

So far, I'm finding that the netbook is making me more productive b/c I can "sneak up on myself" and start working on a project. This is inspired by a project I'm embarking on regarding study habits and affirmation (with Emily Falk and Elliot Berkman) related to my dissertation work on self control and virtue/vice media habits. Basically, if I think about going to a place (usually my office in my house), sitting down and doing work, I don't feel good about it, and I tend to avoid that place. But if I can take the "place" of work out of the equation, if I can get to work as impulsively as I can engage in time-wasting leisure activity, if work becomes as accessible as play, then I think I can get to work before I have a chance to dread it. At least that's the way it worked today.

Pros and Cons of Road Tripping w/ IPhones

Just got back from a road trip from Ann Arbor to Missoula. I was accompanied by two good friends, one of which had an IPhone, the other of which had a Blackberry. I have neither of these mobile technologies. Due to the sudden and complete immersion into a social atmosphere in a limited physical space (my car) in which the distribution of technology was unequeal, I came away with some thoughts on what the technologies mean/do to us.

First off, its silly to say that the technology is good or bad. It is both. The better questions are: "when do these technologies cause social or emotional tension and when do they provide enjoyable experiences for the group or the individual?"

I pointed out to my friends that the use of these phones was stunting conversation in the car and thus making the trip worse for (at the very least) me and potentially alienating us from one another (we don't hang out very often b/c we live in different cities). I felt doubly alienated b/c I didn't know what they were doing on the phones. Were they playing a video game, reading an article, talking to someone else? I felt like I wasn't entertaining enough to be chosen over these other options, which was annoying. They informed me that they were mostly checking and responding to work email. They acknowledged my concerns, but said they wouldn't be able to take vacations like this unless they had devices on whcih to check in on work. Thus, they viewed the phones as enabling more vacation time, more social flexibility, which would make up for the minimal tension created when they both logged on and I sat there doing nothing.

Other times, the phones were used to answer questions, as kind of an Oracle to defer to, to settle disputes. We would argue over how geographers determined where the exact center of the United States was, or who an actor was in a TV show, and instead of going back and forth, we ventured guesses and then confirmed them using the internet. There's something about always having this technology with you (especially if you're out of the house often) that makes its impact on conversations, disputes, and knowledge that much more profound. Most often, we'd have a conversation about anything, then look up something related on wikipedia, and cite some obscure, amusing, related fact. So it was sort of an augmented conversation. I learned more, but it did seem to suck the spontineity out of the conversation at times. And there's something troubling about people citing jokes from the internet instead of making their own.

But the best/worst thing about them was their abilities to navigate. We had a big road atlas which we used, sometimes as a primary source of navigation and other times as a backup to the IPhone. We were aware of the hazards of using the IPhone or GPS as exclusive navigation device. The interesting thing is that those devices have deficiencies (inability to take into account some things a long term resident might know, like the tendency of a resident to park their car too close to the road, thus blocking us from passing) but every deficiency could be corrected if the technology is sufficietly open. The IPhone led us to a closed-for-repair pizza joint in Chicago and a blocked dirt road in Montana. But if someone had been able to upload their personal knowledge of those places and it had instantly updated and been registered in a program that looks for patterns, then the device could incorporate the "folk wisdom" of local residents and been more effective. It was easy to say "there you go, making a false idol out of technology. Nothing will be as good as good ol' fashion human intuition," but I think that misses the point.

In the end, I don't think that the technological inequality detrimentally affected the social vibe in the car. We talked about as much as I would be happy w/ (a lot, to the point where if we talked any more, I would've lost my voice). If I had to venture one possible effect the technology had on the content of our conversations, it was the promotion of non-personal subjects over personal ones. You can't look on the internet for how you feel about something or something about your personal life, but you can look on it for just about everything else. You can even look up people you know on Facebook while talking about them, but that won't tell you how you feel about them. We never really talked too deeply about our personal lives, but maybe that's b/c we've always tended to joke around and debate various topics instead of getting all touchy-feely. Though maybe the tendencies of guys to use mobile technology around one another in certain ways, e.g. to look up stuff, is different from girls' tendencies to do this and that augments a pre-existing gap between single-gender groups in terms of how touchy-feely they get in conversations.

If nothing else, I wasn't sold on the idea of either of these technologies being worth what they're priced at. When I'm sitting at home by myself, its nice to have TV and internet. They are, in some sense, competing w/ books or me staring into space and being introspective. Mobile technologies like the IPhone, for me, would be competing w/ music, podcasts, NPR, and talking to other people, all of which cost me pretty much nothing and all of which kick ass.