smartphones

Mute teenagers, technophobes & art of conversation

Ever since the first cell phones began appearing there has been a grumbling of annoyance. You would think it would subside but nope. In a BBC article yesterday Sherry Turkle is referenced:

People such as psychologist and professor Sherry Turkle warn that we’re in danger of losing the power of speech as we once understood it.

Apparently our smartphones have struck us dumb or mute or something. Turkle brings the classical cry of: Won’t someone think of the children! She argues that they are suffering from Psychological lockjaw.

Seriously this romanticizing of the past through the lenses of technophobia has to stop! Turkle who was once the leading proponent of: everything will be alright once we are online has now become a parent and thinks that her children don’t communicate enough. That their phones are all they stare at – therefore we must be witnessing the death of conversation.

The non-communicative teen is a staple of western culture and definitely predates any mobile technology. Looking around and seeing people happily communicating with devices scare people who are not communicating with devices. It’s not the teens that are losing conversation (they are hugely social and can both talk and text) it’s the lonely who would prefer that everyone was like them that wax lyrical about the past when everyone was joyful without technology.

The composer John Sousa was so annoyed by recorded music that in a submission to a congressional hearing in 1906, he argued:

These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

Our technology has changed the way in which we do things but it does not create change in the way that the technophobes argue. Teens (who are actually normal people, not some weird subclass) have long and heated conversations without devices – but only when it suits them. Just like adults.

Don’t romanticize the past…

newspapers iphones

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Controlled by the path of least resistance

Technological systems leave their mark on the way in which we live our lives. An obvious example is this fascinating nighttime photo of North and South Korea taken from the International Space Station. It’s obvious because the two countries are separated by access to the basic supply of electricity.

North Korea is almost completely dark compared to neighboring South Korea and China. The darkened land appears as if it were a patch of water joining the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan. Its capital city, Pyongyang, appears like a small island, despite a population of 3.26 million (as of 2008). The light emission from Pyongyang is equivalent to the smaller towns in South Korea.

Astronaut photograph ISS038-E-38300 was acquired on January 30, 2014, with a Nikon D3S digital camera using a 24 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center.

An even more brilliant (bad pun) illustration is the images of Berlin by night taken from the International Space Station. The photo, taken by Colonel Chris Hadfield, shows that the city still carries with it the heritage of the division. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and since then Berlin has been rapidly unifying and developing. Despite this, the East-West divide can be seen in the color of the street lights.

Colonel Chris Hadfield’s photograph of Berlin at night shows a divide between the whiter lights of former west Berlin and the yellower lights of the east. Photograph: Nasa

The technological systems follow the political and administrative lines of the past and cannot be removed as easily as the wall which divided them. The Guardian explains the different colors:

Daniela Augenstine, of the city’s street furniture department, says: “In the eastern part there are sodium-vapour lamps with a yellower colour. And in the western parts there are fluorescent lamps – mercury arc lamps and gas lamps – which all produce a whiter colour.” The western Federal Republic of Germany long favoured non-sodium lamps on the grounds of cost, maintenance and carbon emissions, she says.

These examples are of traces of systems that have failed (or are going to fail). They work on the principle that by controlling users with force they can maintain power. In the end, systems like these, will collapse because the effort of keeping control outstrips the ability to control. Real control is efficient when (1) the users internalize the surveillance/supervision (Foucault: Panopticon) AND (2) users believe that they are acting in their own convenience and desire.

What fascinates me with these examples is the way in which our technology use marks our surroundings. An obvious example of this is the desire path that line which appears in the snow or bare track in the grass that shows how the world is really used by people as opposed to the idea which the designer believed the technology would be used.

“Desire Path”, Finsbury Park by John Keane CC BY SA

The difference between expected use and actual use. Technology use leaves its traces in our consumption and adaption to the technology upon which we rely. However, it works both ways. By controlling the technology we rely on, we the users, can be led to believe that we desire the features of control that are provided.

An example of this is the way in which the popularity of the iPhone is no way diminished by, from a usability point of view, android operating systems are infinitely more adaptable to different needs. Or the ways in which the collection of data from technology users is all but ignored by the users in their desire for convenience.

If the iTunes/iPhone is to be compared to a silo keeping its users locked in, then it can only succeeded if (1) the users can be convinced that they are happy with the surveillance/control (Foucault: Panopticon) AND (2) any other alternative would be less convenient. If (1) fails then users would happily jailbreak their devices (on a much larger scale than now) and if (2) fails then the system will eventually collapse under its own weight when users realize that life is better on the other side of the wall.

We will all be controlled by the path of least resistance.

 

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Anti-Smartphone is still a thing

I found it difficult not to snigger at The Telegraph article about chefs wanting to ban smartphones and photography in their restaurants.

An example of a chef wanting to ban smartphones in his restaurant is Gilles Goujon (L’Auberge du Vieux Puits, 3 Michelin stars) because “If people take a photo and put it out on social media, it takes away the surprise”…”It takes away a little bit of my intellectual property too. Someone could copy me”… “Plus a photo taken on an average smartphone is rarely a great image. It doesn’t give the best impression of our work. It’s annoying.” So basically, it takes away the surprise, steals his intellectual property and doesn’t even do it to a level of quality to which he approves.

The first is maybe right, the second is wrong as he does not have intellectual property rights in his dishes to prevent photography, and the last bit was a bit whiny and reminded me of the strangest complaint “the food was awful and the portions too small”. But yes, I get it. His reputation is at stake and the amateurs are not helping by taking lousy pictures.

Simple Pleasures by Wrote. CC BY NC

Is it just me? Maybe I have been looking at technology for too long? but haven’t we heard all these arguments before? “Cell phones should be banned on trains, buses etc” seems so 1995. Cameraphones need to be controlled seems so 1998. “Hipsters taking pictures of food are ruining our lives” is so 2009. (Cannot resist mentioning the comic Pictures of Hipsters Taking Pictures of Food).

Against those who want to ban the technology we have those who claim it is all beneficial. The photographs are marketing and show appreciation. The buzz will bring in more business etc. This may be true or not. Proof is not really what it’s all about. What surprises me a decade of technology later is the places where technology use is not allowed or the knee-jerk outrage and attempts to limit technology, like those mentioned in the article.

Sure there are situations where it is called for. For security and safety I will not use my phone where it may cause harm. I even turn my phone off on planes – there is no harm but the security theater demands it and other passengers may feel safer for it. But there are places where I cannot understand the no phone rule. Most annoying? Waiting in the long line for US passport control after a long plane ride and not being able to text and tweet my arrival. Sitting in other American government waiting rooms there are prominent no phone signs. In Sweden banks seem to be anti-phones and carry signs against them.

The phone is not a right, and even if it were private spaces can create rules against them. But the way in which we are conditioned today taking away our phones only increases our stress. Why are so many spaces still anti-phone?

 

 

Posted on by Mathias Klang