Well I actually thought the summer would be a time that it would be easier for me to write here, but that’s obviously not proven to be the case. We’re moving (not far, just 30 minutes or so up the road) and that’s proven to be a massive time suck as you might imagine.

However an interesting article in Wired in case you missed it, When Cell Phones Become Oracles. The article relates a study at the MIT Media Lab regarding data mined from cell phone usage in an experiment involving various folks at MIT. Using information such as location, proximity, activity and interaction, the experimenters were able to actually predict future actions. Some businesses are apparently already interested in using the software created for the experiment to better understand how their employees actually relate to one another (organizational chart notwithstanding).

Of course this is just a blip of what ubiquitous computing promises in terms of commerical and big brotherly applications. The article notes though that the software allows one to gain further insight into one’s own habits.

Yeah…ok. The only thing is that I can’t see that I really want to know. Do I really want a device to gather so much information about me that it can predict what I’m going to do next? And at what point  do we begin to take that predication as a recommendation or as a critique? (The cell phone says I’m going to do what? Well maybe I should, or is that really the kind of person I am?) In this respect, the cell phone becomes the latest confessional technology (a la Foucault).

Blogs, as diary-like devices, are obvious sites of confession, operating on the perception of the so-called liberating experience (confession is good for the soul)–as well as responding to exhibitionist and the desire for attention. In this respect though, blogs are not unlike much "personal" writing. Certainly FYC assignments, particularly those in the expressivist/personal narrative vein, serve a similar confessional function.

However, these cell phones present us with a new compositional strategy. One might be tempted to say that our confessions are written for us, but that’s not exactly the case. Instead, we compose our confessions via a new mode, through embodied action and social behavior. So hypothetically my website composes a double-entry ledger: a record of what my cell phone says I’m doing and what my cell phone says I’ll do next. I can learn to manipulate those entries as I come to master the feedback operation, the structure of the discourse. Perhaps in this respect it is not so different from learning to master the personal narrative or the blog: it is yet another rhetorical-compositional skill.