How many wikipedia articles have you read on your smartphone vs. ones you've read on your laptop/desktop?
"In your pocket" represents a world of difference.
"In your pocket" represents a world of difference.
Admittedly a lot of people would probably just stick to browsing Facebook or Twitter most of the time, but even then, they'll look up tons of small facts and trivia pieces through Google whenever they don't know something too. In the olden days, that wasn't possible. Even less people looked up stuff they were curious about, since it meant either having to go home and online (before phones) or bringing out the encyclopedia (before computers in general).
Most of my mobile searches are related to a) things I'm learning right now, or b) things I've just read about and I don't know what they are.
I read a lot of 18th/19th century lit. Wikipedia is like having footnotes for anything you are reading. I use it regularly, almost exclusively on my iPhone.
From 'The Way I Am', sung by Merle Haggard and many more:
I wish I enjoyed how I made my living,
Did what I do with a willing hand.
Some may run but that ain't like me,
So I just dream, keep on being the way that I am.
Or not! Maybe you are fully accepting and fully aware and it is I who is missing the extra pieces to the puzzle!
But maybe both of us are right, just right about different population groups? Maybe I happen to mostly see the use of social media I'd consider reasonable, and this biases my perception? Bubbles are strong in physical world too.
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[0] - The kind of "smartphones make us antisocial on trains", except they don't, because before smartphones it was walkmans, and before walkmans it was newspapers.
It is true that newspapermen created the Spanish-American war out of thin air as well, but we learned our lessons about the unethical use of mass print media. Irony of ironies in the name Pulitzer Prize!
I just want to make sure we're not blind to the downsides of this new "liberating" technology. It has had plenty of defenders and has swept up billions of people in its grasp.
Perhaps feeling depressed by staged photos of a friend on vacation posted to Facebook is one thing but threats of nuclear war on Twitter are a much more serious matter!