I recently purchased my entry visa to our current decade by investing in a smartphone, and I’m having mixed feelings about it. Not the phone, necessarily, but what the phone means.
Before I was a proud owner, I was a bit of a smartphone neophyte. I thought of myself as one of the last people on earth who should have one. I hate texting, I’m only on Facebook when I’m procrastinating, and as anyone who’s ever tried to email me probably knows, I’m the literal worst at responding.
I don’t seem a good fit for a device whose main purpose is to keep its owner connected to the digital world. I was expecting that it would be just one more thing to feel guilty about.
But I have a smartphone now, and I really, really like it.
Since I wasn’t interested or dedicated enough to research my purchase, I took the advice of the friendly salespeople at one of those booths at the mall.
I went home and spent about 20 minutes Googling the phone they’d chosen for me, decided I liked it, then purchased it the next day with all the satisfaction of a person who had done their research, without having to put in the time and frustration of actually researching it.
Anyway, I’m now the proud owner of a smartphone. I can access my email and social media anywhere, and I can carry useful stuff like maps, a camera, a tip calculator, a clock and a high-resolution picture of Tom Hiddleston in my purse at all times. Most important, I can Google anything, anywhere.
It’s so fancy, it’s distracting: I was trying to look something up on my phone the other day when my roommate suggested I call the place instead. I blinked at her. I’d forgotten my phone could be used as a phone.
There are definitely downsides to owning a smartphone, and the most powerful and most subtle one was the immediate change in the way I looked at accessing information.
You know when you and your friends are all sitting around a table in a restaurant, and apropos of the conversation, someone idly wonders … something?
You know how frustrating it is when the smartphone users immediately rush to Google the answer?
Idle questions are often jumping-off points for the larger conversation to take shape. Instant access to Google causes you to reformat conversations into a “you-have-question, I-have-answer” formula that ruins the mood, since everyone has to wait for you to look up the answer to the question that nobody really needed answered. You’re holding the table hostage with your: “Wait, I can Google it!”
Worse is when two people are racing to find the answer to “I wonder how old Jennifer Aniston was when she was pregnant?” and everyone else is just waiting, because all they wanted to talk about was Friends’ relevance to current attitudes toward pregnancy, but they can’t, because you hijacked the conversation and turned it into a “whose fingers are faster” derby. Knowing the age of Rachel’s actress when she had her first child doesn’t make it a better conversation.
The danger in thinking that you always have the answers is that it turns you into some self-styled gatekeeper of knowledge. It’s like being the only person who’s allowed to read the answers in a Trivial Pursuit game that nobody else wants to play.
My smartphone is the place where the physical world interacts with the digital world. This can be incredibly useful, but unless you need to look up an address or tipping protocol, it’s probably not necessary or even that helpful in social contexts.
When texting became a thing, we all had to remind our friends that checking their phones when you were talking was spectacularly rude. Smartphone etiquette is still in its infancy, but let’s agree that unless it’s crucial to the conversation to know when Jennifer Aniston became pregnant, burying your head in your smartphone might not be the most considerate thing you could be doing.
