The Smartphone Society
The comparison with another invention of the past? Cars and the power they had and have in our existence. Finding a work more distant from a community not in grade of offering too many opportunities is possible thanks to a car. Sure cars meant for Americans a revelation; people became to be less devoted to church, passing much more time on their cars.
Smartphone is maybe also much more compulsive than a car.
I read the piece written by Lucy Kellaway, a reporter of the Financial Times, cyted in the book. She lost her smartphone and she experienced at first a great frustration. I found the piece hylarious because at first, it is true, losing a smartphone means like to lose a portion of our self: thanks to it, we check e-mails messages, we use whatsup, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook. It is true that when we are completely cleaned by this dependance it seems that exist a different freedom and the world the old one we had known before the advent of smartphones appear in all its beauty.
A smartphone is totalizing. It absorbs all our existence. Google Maps, social medias, FaceTime, it is one of our most absorbing and powerful objects in the hands.
Imagining an existence without smartphone is difficult where not impossible remarks the author.
Smartphones mean new way of working. I experienced personally this aspect: they impact, violently also regarding every possible democratic aspect of a country, influencing policy and the future.
Our dependance starts from the morning till at the moment we go to bed. Most people love to bring their smartphones close to their beds and when they awake in the night they enjoy reading messages and texts received in the while. We bring it everywhere; on our tables while we are eating, in the bedroom, in our bathroom! The smartphone is incredibly close to an extension of our body, not just our mind.
Customs are different from country to country. Indians, an example, love to sending a lot of "Good Morning!" messages on Whatsup.
The power of a smartphone is well known: it gives the possibility of reaching anywhere in the world, someone at the speed of light.
If a PC was the "Man Of The Year" of The Time in 1982, the smartphone changed with the time, profoundly our society.
In this very sad pandemic moment, smartphone are crucials for reaching people, speaking with someone distant from us who differently we could not reach because of the impossibility of going anywhere, considering the heavy limitation we must follow for staying alive and healthy, checking for news and posting in social medias, so that more people can read them; using e-mails, personally becoming an ebook lover in this difficult phase for the Planet and much much more; continuing to use smartphone for work.
Which is the psychological contact existing between a person and his/her smartphone? Without that we are all like lost; but also as Turkle adds "Less connected, less creative and fulfilled. We are diminished, in retreat.”
Smartphones are not just important, but crucials in all that areas of the Planet, a large number where there is not a great, good internet connection. That little beasts can play a great and revealing role. In Nigeria, adds the author, doctors share medical informations with colleagues living in other part of the Globe.
It's a world of knowledge, not just a tool that we are sometimes not in grade of using properly.
The 80% of the American population own a smartphone and smartphones at the moment, writes the author, "reflect the shape of society" and a window on the world.
The book treats also problematic connected at the use of smartphone from brown/black people. A smartphpne is also synonime of profound divisions existing in our social tissue, so gender, sexual preferences, ethnicity, religion.
Smartphone for people of color are like a gun because they can prove, filming videos with their smartphone, what it is going on during interactions of people with police-men. It's an evidence for getting justice.
Same is in Australia as you will read.
You will also read the condition of women and how they interact with platoforms like Match Group, owner of Tinder, Match.com, OKCupid, PlentyOfFish.
Love is also pretty dirty and teenager's (girls, in particular) existence is pretty troubled. Parents accept sexual intercourses, but they strongly disagree the phaenomenon of the sexting, sending naked pictures to other people, friends or boyfriend.
In this case both parents and police men are scandalized by this behavior.
The author takes then in consideration all that apps for working like Uber is for drivers for then making a comparison with the past and recent titans.
If American had known in the past men like Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, creators of railroads, steel mills, finance, pushing people off the farm to the cities, offering jobs, helping immigrants and much more the news companies making the difference are these groups: Facebook, Gmail, Google Maps, Amazon, Facebook Messenger, YouTube, Google Search, Google Play Store, Instagram, Apple App Store and behind these platforms there are these names, the new moguls of the XXI century: Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos. "Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is worth $112 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is worth $69 billion. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, more than $50 billion each" writes the author.
These big companies spends a lot on lobbying.
Amazon's chinese answer is Alibaba, created by Jack Ma.
The author treats also the chapter of fake news and the importance of good, relevant pieces published by big realities, so that there are no problems. Circulation of a lot of fake news in social medias is big.
People tend to post everything on social medias: what they eat, what they visit, where they go.
As remarks the author: Smartphones are a godsend for the dramaturgical aspects of life,.
René Descartes said once that the body was like a beast; senses as a “prison for the
reasoning soul.”
We are heavily controlled and spied. Not a surprise, but our life is known, scrutinazed, discovered every second. They see every single aspect of our existence like also what we like, disklike, links we like, videos we watch, but also the tone of our skin, and your facial expressions, our location data.
Google saves every e-mail we send and all the rest.... Bookmarks. search, download, every click and nothing, nothing is deleted. Android works similarly. Webcam, microphone, but also where you were while you searching for a query. Bed, kitchen. They know everything.
We are controlled also regarding our favorite movies, tv programs, sites visited.
The other social medias are similar.
Sure: if someone would spy us, we would be pretty upset; the net does it every second of our existence but we don't see it, and so we can't feel a sensation of rebellion. Maybe, just resignation.
A chapter treats Trump and his compulsion for tweets and the 2016 political campign brought him at the White House ; Trump is compared with other Presidents who made the differenct like Roosevelt and Kennedy for the electorate.
The importance of policy at the moment passes also through the smartphone but also important movement created for the most diversified purposes, like the #NeverAgain movement for a different regulation of guns control.
An informative book! I am sure you will love it.
Highly recommended.
I thank Beacon Press for the copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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