Smartphones Smartphones everywhere and not a drop to drink

What’s in a smartphone?  They all have their different features and varying functionalities.  Many of you looking for a review of a smartphone will want to know how long the battery lasts and whether or not it multi-tasks.  How many apps are to be found in the app store and what is their average cost?  All very pertinent questions and I certainly recommend you find your answers before purchasing your chosen brand.  But you won’t find them answered here.  A specific review of a particular brand is a somewhat pedestrian task that I’ll leave to the tech blogs.  In this review I’ll be looking at the smartphone as a singular genus.  Most people don’t have one and may be wondering whether its time to step up.  Well, I’m going to go deep into the questions inspired by the rise of the smartphone.  Is it a must have tool?  Or another chain to the modern world?  Time to find out.

This reviewer is old enough to remember the introduction of the mobile phone into contemporary culture.  There was a kind of suspicion among the folk that you commonly heard expressed.  Those that bought a mobile phone were ‘wankers’ that only succeeded in proving how status conscious they were.  Everyone repeated the urban myth of the guy on the bus caught talking into his mobile just before it would ring in his ear.  As they gained in popularity, the holdouts would chastise the world around them – would mutter how everyone was addicted to material things they did not need.

Then all of a sudden everyone had one – and the social debate that surrounded their adoption completely ceased.  Everyone accepted that they had to be accessible all the time.  The new anxiety of missing that important call became a standard feature of our lives.  Thoreau’s ‘quiet desperation’ seemed to grow a new tendril.

Now comes the smartphone.  I’ve detected a similar resistance – and a similar, inexorable creep nonetheless.  The invasion of the public into the personal sphere takes on an entirely new dimension on account of this technology.  To be sure, part of this has to do with the rise of social networking which is ultimately its own phenomenon – something on which the smartphone is merely piggybacking.  But the smartphone adds an element which many have already commented on extensively – location.

Location based services will be a social frontier that will be harder for the corporations to crack than social networking has been.  I know a few people with smartphones.  None of them have Latitude enabled – a google service that allows you to see the location of your friends.  Too creepy – they all say.  Then there is the fact that google wants to collect all that data about where you have been, and use that to serve up location based advertising that is highly targeted to the likes and dislikes that you as an individual have.

Is this exploitation or service?  These sorts of technologies make it extremely difficult to determine which is which.  We simply do not have the ethical or conceptual resources to make a determination either way.  We learn more and more everyday that the individual is far from an autonomous, self determining entity.  Neo Marxian theorists have been telling us for a long time that individual desires are determined externally by marketing agencies.  The marketers retort that they only seek to discover desires and work to satisfy them – and as such do nothing but serve the individual and common good.

Google's Nexus One smartphone is one of the most sophisticated smartphones on the market today

Either way it’s impossible not to consider the possibilities for social benefit that such devices will enable.  Imagine you are at your favourite bar in the city.  Your phone buzzes and notifies you of all the people within twenty feet that share a great number of your own interests.  Perhaps it buzzes in your pocket in a particular way when you end up talking to a person that you most likely won’t like.

Certainly these technologies will start out as being fairly simplistic and inaccurate.  But they will develop ever more sophisticated algorithms that apply stochastic models to preference behaviour, drawing on the data set of a billion people.  You learn to trust the algorithm as knowing you better than you know yourself.  Every now and again you are tempted off course by a romantic whim – but always regret it afterwards.

Something very deep and primal within us resists this picture as perverse in the extreme.  What is the complaint exactly?  Desires are satisfied.  People are happy.

But life on a handrail – is that really what we want?

But there are other aspects of control involved in having a computer in your pocket.  Already there are services that are built around the concept of psychological rewards.  Four Square is an application available on the both the Iphone and Android.  It gives you the ability to check in when you arrive at a destination.  If you have checked in the most times, you get to be the mayor of this location.  It provides a reward system for getting out and seeing your locality.

The curious thing is that this system manages to elicit this psychological reward in the mind of the player even though there is no real world complement.  But this is not in itself a new phenomenon.  It’s exactly the same thing that keeps fourteen million people around the world subscribed to World of Warcraft… or the countless others currently addicted to Farmville on facebook.  It’s the same thing that causes people to give over their hard earned for fake furniture in the Sims 3.  The natural reward system of the human animal is easily co-opted into pointless activities that only degrade its overall quality of life.

But what is new is that the smartphone allows the game to be constantly in play.  To play these games previously, one has always had to be tied to something, a desktop computer, a horse racetrack, a stockmarket.  This is no longer the case.  And this will allow for all sorts of new games that will make it nearly impossible to self-determine yourself in any meaningful way.  We will all be chasing points – and society will no doubt forget what it is like for an individual to determine what the REAL points of life should be.  Such individuals that endure will come to be regarded as the perverse.

So should you get a smartphone?  The question is redundant.  You already don’t have a choice.  Your ownership of a smartphone device – short of some economic catastrophe that drives their cost out of reach – is inevitable.  You’re only hope is to be one of the ones that write the algorithms that determine the existence of everyone else, as opposed to being the output of an algorithm yourself.  Better get that phone as soon as you can and start learning to code for it.