Reality Mining the Organization

"Reality Mining" the Organization talks about tracking whom employees talk to, what they talk about and what tone of voice they are using. My first response was “how scary!” I mean, I don’t care if my company knows who I’m talking to, but to know when I talk to them, what I say and even what tone of voice I use sounds like big brother. Now, in practice, nobody is actually going to listen to the conversation, like nobody actually reads all my emails that they track. However, I think the data will much more likely be used to correct than to collaborate. So I think it’s much more likely that they would discover someone is antagonistic to 90% of people, and decide that combined with their poor performance, they aren’t worth keeping, then someone would decide that because someone regularly talks about the latest technology with ten of their friends, that they should be on the new technology team. But you never know, like all technology, its usefulness will depend on how well it’s deployed.