Technology Is So Ingrained Into Our Lives That It Has Begun To Dematerialize Other Things
IF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD ABOUT THE SOCIOLOGICAL ISSUES YOUR PHONE CAUSES, YOU NEED TO
You don’t realize it until you think about it, but smartphones have really changed the way people live. Technology allows us to do so many things that we couldn’t before. Everything is now at the touch of our fingertips and we don’t even realize it. We always ask for things to be even easier and more accessible, but sometimes we miss the fact that things are already so much more accessible than they used to be.
For example, our phones can now be used as our credit cards. This completely eliminates having to dig through your purse or wallet for your card. People already have their phones on hand. Now, all they have to do is press a button twice and they can just pay by tapping their phone on the reader. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great feature, but it completely eliminates the need to have a physical credit card on hand. I no longer have to worry about walking out of the house without my wallet. Everything I would ever need is at my fingertips.
Our phones are “the last thing we look at before we sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking.” Less than a decade ago, these smartphones were such an insignificant part of our everyday life. But now, we rely on them to communicate, entertain ourselves, find our way around, etc. They have altered the texture of everyday life and sometimes it isn’t even possible to see the full extent to which we can use them. In order to understand these uses and see how it has changed our lives, we have to take a step back.
Adam Greenfield, the author of an article I read, says that many things that used to be a part of our lives have been dematerialized. There are certain things that we no longer need to do simply because of a small chunk of metal in our hands. Some of the things that have been dematerialized include opening the front door, buying groceries, hopping onto the bus, etc. These things have been turned into a digital transactions, and no longer hold importance over our lives. Instead of opening the front door, we can press a button. Instead of buying groceries, we can order them online and have them delivered to our doorstep. Instead of hopping on a bus, we can order an uber that would only pick us up. The things we may have needed to do these things, like having house keys and bus tokens have been replaced by radio waves, as Greenfield puts it. The interactions we would have with ordinary objects have completely disappeared from sight and from thought.
Greenfield believes that the 2005 era of mobile phones was perfect. He says that the platform was the perfect size and shape to accommodate all of our needs. And at the time, everyone who needed a phone had one. And I agree. Now we see all these features on our phones making us lazy. There are young children damaging their eyes and brains all because they now have phones that they don’t need. It’s weird to think that the newer generations may not know a life without smartphones.
Why do you think people keep coming out with ways to make our lives easier. What makes them come back, leaving us to want more. And why do you think we want more features that would make us lazier? It’s because our sense of the world is subtly conditioned by information that is presented to us for interesting reasons. But what that interest is, we don’t know. Every time some new feature comes out, we instantly jump on it. We have to know what it is and exactly how to work it. It could even be the most subtle of things, like changing the finger recognition on our phones to facial recognition. Showing our phones rather than having to press a button and resting our thumb on it saves no more than half a second, and yet people love this feature so much. Why? Because of how it feeds this unknown interest we have.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, interaction designers have learned to stimulate this desire we have. They know how to change us materially, rewire our neurotransmitter pathways, light up the reward circuits of our brain, and enhance the odds that will trigger this whole cycle again when the dopamine surge subsides in a few seconds. And they’ll do it again. Think about the world today and the interactions we have with and without technology. Then come back in ten years or even one and look at how much it will have already changed.
The information in this post was acquired from the article, “A Sociology of the Smartphone,” by Adam Greenfield.