Can You Hear Me Now?
 Americans and citizens around the world quickly embraced "smart phone"
technology, touted for the new world convenience it provided: online banking,
directions-finding, shopping, games playing, personal GPS, detail of everything
they've done for every minute of every day, detailed personal preferences,
present location, identifying features, ethnic profile... Hey, wait a minute! No
wonder this year's word-of-somebody's-year is "Selfie"! We did it to ourselves!
By RAR
No
device ever conceived has produced the reductive power of the "cellular device",
and by reductive I mean the power to reduce its user to a few operable units of
information. Operating on those units of information are operators whose purpose
is to exploit the profile the user has created by the mere act of using the
device.
Somehow
calling a mobile phone a "cellular device" has struck the world as funny, though
when one considers the implications of a "cell phone" the chuckles tend to
subside. Until the scientists at Bell Labs started adapting wireless radio
transmission technologies used during WWII, putting telephones in top-end luxury
automobiles in 1946, all things cellular had to do with organic life forms or
systems for incarcerating forms of organic life, e.g., jail cells.
The Bell Labs people created interconnecting geometric shapes roughly centered
around pockets of use of wireless telephones, thus creating a cellular network
that continues to grow in an organic fashion as the use of wireless devices
increases.
Here is your Wikipedia definition of a geometric shape:
"A geometric shape is the geometric
information which remains when location, scale, orientation and reflection
are removed from the description of a geometric object. That is, the result
of moving a shape around, enlarging it, rotating it, or reflecting it in a
mirror is the same shape as the original, and not a distinct shape."
There,
in a nutshell, is the issue with cellular technology. It is not a living
organism and yet it thrives on the functions of living organisms and mimics
their growth in an evolution of artificial intelligence that reflects users' own
information right back at them.
There
you have the aforementioned "operators": the service providers who mine user
data to develop detailed user profiles fleshed-out willingly by the users
themselves. Users, by their own volition, position themselves within series of
cells, each of which provides greater granularity of information about the users
contained therein.
Cell
phones have an apparently lobotomizing effect on their users. There now exists a
world of people who walk through life staring into cell phones, providing a
steady stream of personal, previously-private information as they remain in
constant contact with friends, associates, stockers and other people they
probably don't know, i.e., the data miners.
To a
person not addicted to cellular technology - the leash that tethers users to a
constant stream of text messages, Tweets, Facebook updates, photo sharing,
office email, etc. - the advantages gained by using these devices seem pale
compared to what users surrender in exchange. Key among these willing sacrifices
is privacy - the ability to maintain a safe place to which to retreat
when retreating is the best course of action - and the blissfully ignorant among
us might want to consider the ramifications of that. Does one wish to remain
constantly available, a dog on a leash?
Ironically, in sacrificing privacy addicted users also surrender their social
natures and their socialability. Here red flags pop up everywhere among
those people who suspect that personal developments that conflict with one
another signify reasons to be alarmed. Life has this way of rewarding people in
something like equal measure to the their own contributions, i.e., you get out
of life what you put into it. Cell phone use seems socially destructive in these
and other ways:
-
Users talk on cell phones, even headsets, as they wander through public
places, apparently feeling that they are moving within cones of deflection,
protected from the public environment that surrounds them, and absolved of
any responsibility for interaction with it.
-
Users stare into cell phones as they stand on line, surrounded by other
people, many of whom are doing the same basically anti-social thing. The act
of occupying close space with other people with whom you will not interact
on some basic level of social etiquette is an anti-social act.
-
Users check their cell phones for messages constantly, even during business
meetings and important social functions, such as family dinners. This is
passive aggression, a statement saying that the user has more important
things in their life than what is presently at hand.
Somehow
cell phone users have achieved a shared agreement that excuses them from
personal interactions if there is some reason they can think of to use their
cellular device instead. The device takes precedence over people.
Cell
phone users not only surrender the desire to communicate on an interpersonal
level, but also the means to communicate with any level of depth and detail.
The
world today is actually devolving communication skills; returning to a more
primitive state of written communications that relies on broad symbols
(emoticons) and short-cut versions of real words (abbreviations, acronyms). This
has created a reduction of actual information that has lowered the expectation
of depth in interpersonal communications, and has in turn reduced users'
interest in or ability to read detailed documentation of any kind. In the U.S.,
we have whole generations of elected officials who will seek defense on grounds
of unavoidable ignorance because the legislation documents are too long and
detailed for them to read and understand. This is all related to the reductive
methods and means of communication that have been introduced through the advent
of cellular devices.
Product
developers no longer produce detailed documentation. People don't read
instruction manuals anymore, not when every electronic device works on a
somewhat standardized model of user interface. Devices are not incredibly
complex things to operate, and they are specialized to such a degree that they
require only a few controls.
Even
documentation of technical procedures, design guidelines, and technical work
plans are stripped down to bare minimum these days, with manufacturers
preferring to have their customers rely on user forums; to, in effect, be their
own organic Help systems. Those forums provide the last lines of nerd defense,
the last place where hope for actual needed information on product features and
use may reside. That is a small group of volunteers upon which to place the hope
of all device-addicted mankind, should their come a time when everyone needs
information and assistance all at once. That is a risk feature of the cellular
network. A cell can go dark and one links to the next, and large parts or even
whole networks may experience outages.
The
question of our present age may be, What do we have once the network goes down?
Or worse yet, What will we have in the future if the network stays up?
There
is a investment-loss ratio to life. Are the things that we do returning values
equal to or greater than the tangible losses we incur by engaging in these
activities?
It
takes a keen mind to parse and factor that equation, given the subjective
aspects that people apply to returned value. Is the sense of safety that
one feels in talking on a cell phone to a family member while traversing a dark
parking lot outweighing the potential downside of your system provider tracking
your movements and monitoring your calls? People will always choose denial as
their first response to almost anything, save possibly direct personal assault,
so most people will choose to go with the immediately tangible benefit (a
feeling of safety).
And who
minds having the National Security Agency listening to your cell phone calls if
there is nothing you have to hide? There again is the investment-loss ratio at
work, except at issue here is the value one places on their own person. What
does it mean to be part of a cellular network that links wireless transmitters
and produces patterns within that cellular structure that detail not only you
and your location within that structure, but also everyone else who happens to
be like you in a variety of sortable data points, or ways.
In our
global addiction to the use of cellular devices, we have executed the ultimate
in "selfies". We have systematically dumbed ourselves down and positioned
ourselves within boxed places, like components within those shipping containers
carried aboard ocean-going freighters.
One
wonders where we will be dropped off, and if that grumpy cat meme will have any
value as you and yours sink into the abyss.
112613
|
