The Mood Phone
via Kevin Kelly’s blog on ‘The Quantified Self’.
(article by Gary Wolf) A few weeks ago I wrote about the dream of the mood phone. This dream has been so persistent that its appeal probably reaches beyond mere technical utility to touch other, unspoken feelings about the role of the phone in our social life. After all, it is often hard to perceive the mood of a person on the other end of a phone conversation. The other person’s mood is inaccessible to us through the instrument that connects us, and maybe we wish that the phone were enhanced, so that it could deliver a better signal about the state of the person we are talking to. The phone is intimate, in a way: we have their voice in our ear. But it is impersonal, also: we are kept from noticing many important things.ÂÂ
Simultaneous intimacy and inaccessibility: this also describes our relationship with our own moods. We know our moods well, we feel them directly. And yet, sometimes we fail to notice them, or even mistake them. A person observing us from the outside can say: “Are you angry? You seem angry.” And we may have to pause for a minute and ask: “am I angry?” We are both intimate with and separate from our moods, both near and far, like when we talk on the phone.