I’ve been playing recently with a phone app called “Mood Map,” an experimental Intel program that allows you to track your moods. According to creator Margaret Morris, Mood Map “invites self-awareness and self-regulation by asking people to use the symbols of fire and water to characterize their emotional states and to practice techniques from yoga and cognitive therapy. In the app, images of fire—from an unlit match to raging flame and the aftermath of a forest fire—represent different stages of anger. Conversely, water symbolizes calm. These heating and cooling metaphors represent stress; they are rooted in medical models as well as folklore and ethnographic research” (n.p.). The app prompts me throughout the day to swipe right for good feeling, left for bad feeling, and then tag my moods with words, locations, and situations. Morris and her team have conducted empirical research about the application, noting, for instance, “The individuals who used the mobile therapy app readily used the images to describe their own emotions and interpersonal

dynamics" (n.p.). Verbalucce, another app that Morris and her team have created, lets you evaluate your emails, for

instance, and lets you know where your communication style is markedly differently from your interlocutors—a difference perhaps contributing to miscommunication.

 

Both Mood Map and Verbalucce are programs in orientation—the latter overtly orienting you to mold your communication patterns and attune them to others so that you can avoid possible conflict, and the former allowing you (and those with whom you share it) a way to track your mood and thus your behavior as well. Mood Map specifically orients you to maintaining a good mood, prompting you to track and cultivate a good mood over multiple days to earn “badges”(!). Such programs form part of what Thomas Rickert calls “ambient rhetoric,” the deeply interrelated mix of objects, emotions, and dynamics that form the ecologies in which we move, compose, and make meaning. But they’re also more than that; they are orienting devices that vector larger cultural values and attune us to them.