A Sociology of the Smartphone

Technological advances don't seem to have an undo button, as far as I can tell. Once a technology of utility is unleashed, things keep advancing and the genie never goes back into the bottle.

I suppose technology can go backwards, but only by way of generation-spanning disaster. The fall of Rome is an obvious example. I guess this means we'll be dealing with this constant technological overload for the rest of our natural lives, huh?

Wouldn't it be a treat if this article were presented to prospective buyers of smartphones rather than a bland ToS?

Sign right here to strike this Faustian bargain.

(Disclosure: I own and operate a smartphone.)

For all the 'power' these smart phones have given us, it fills me with confusion, pity and annoyance when I walk in to someone's house only to see all the inhabitants looking down at their phones. Occasionally, they'll be engaging on the same content/media, reacting digitally and sometimes (as it's usually humorous) verbally. I've banned phones at the dinner table (mine only) and for a future vacation, will set out very clear 'acceptable usage' limits to my wife. I'd like to think I could give up mine but still a sucker for a good meme to lift me times are low.

There's a lot wrong with this article. Do people actually use their phones for transit? I have transit cards from like 10 cities, and transit cards don't run out of batteries. Cards/cash don't run out of batteries either, and you can use them to refill your transit card, and I don't see those getting replaced any time soon. (Germans still use cash for like everything, which feels weird in an EU country).

And we still have plenty of phone booths ... if you need to take a piss. I'm pretty sure that's the only thing they're used for in London. Seriously don't touch those; they're disgusting.

Do people actually meet legit partners and friends from apps? I've never met anyone off Tinder (I'm not all that cute really), dating websites are a wasteland and all the people I've had meaningful relationships I've met at things I like to do. Sure we have meetups, but they really just facilitate what we use to do with flyers/posters before. Meeting people still takes work. No one meets of Internet chat rooms like in the AOL/Seinfeld era. The Facebook generation of social networks wants you to only connect with people you already know.

Smart phones, cell phones, affordable laptops, the Internet, television, radio, magazines, news and print media ...

Every advancement is huge. Every advancement initially supplied free and open speech. Printing presses pre-civil war were less than $10k USD to setup (in today's money). Papers crossed the country and spread news and opinions. Large media, advertising, the pony express (incredibly expensive but necessary for consolidating news) caused the price of starting a viable news print service to over $10 million in today money, by the 1930s. Same thing happened to Radio...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP_3WnJ42kw

Are phones a much bigger revolution than many of the previous ones? Yes. It's more power than a Pentium4 laptop, in your pocket, and always connected. But it wasn't unpredictable. Engineers at MIT in the 90s/2000s had bulky wearable with eye monitors and small hand keyboard (we still haven't see an viable version of this concept, like the glasses in Back to the Future, except maybe the Google Glass). Old Sci-Fi books have people typing messages on their wrist computers.

It's a big deal yes, but a lot of what we see today is "get off my lawn" and "those dumb [millennials, boombers, gen-x] are so entitled." Adam Conover does a GREAT commentary on the problem with generation labels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

..and he says that we try to blame the media (radio, televisions, phones) and all the same things we say about phones today we could see in magazines applied to TVs decades ago. It's not that media is changing things, it's just more media.

Look back at videos from the 1960s in big cities. People still didn't talk to each other on the trams, the subways, the rails .. they had out their newspapers and their magazines. Jump to the 1980s and the nerdy kids and adults had their walkmans. Jump to the 90s and everyone had a walkman or discman (that ate batteries).

Today phones have replaced a lot, but they have added to the ability to be minimalist. They need to be built to last longer (I would rather keep a phone for 5 years .. planned or negligent obsolescence is insanely wasteful. Most of those old walkmans on eBay still work), but I don't think they've changed things as significantly as the author suggested.

We don't look in at TVs in store front windows to watch the news, but we still watch sports together in bars. We're still getting news from huge monolithic sources, but now it's in our hand instead of on the news stand. We no longer have to wait in a parking lot and be like, "Where is Nick?" "I just called his house on that payphone. His mom said he left like 30 min ago." "arg I wish he'd get here. I wanted to start at 9am!" .. we get lost less, we organize people better, we no longer have to send mail to "general delivery" at a post office if we don't know someone's address.

We have all this communication, but futurists predicted these types of advancements would come. The privacy aspects .. yes those are frightening. Yet it's just an extension of what we were doing in the 80s with the earliest credit reporting and financial computers (See Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization).

I don't think articles like this do us a service because they're not presenting the advancements through a meaningful lens.