Mobile dilemma...

Mobile devices are incredible things. No longer is a mobile simply a transportable means of calling one another for mere conversation, they now enable us to connect with the world at large, speak face-to-face with people in real-time who are living on the other side of the world and actually DO stuff that we used to have to do in person - I’m thinking book tickets to a far away land, scan my barcode ticket at the boarding gate, arrive in faraway land and take a seamless panoramic photo, then upload photo and ‘check-in’ at the swankiest hotel I can find and have my facebook friends tell me how successful I am for achieving my life goals – come on, we’re all guilty of this right?

But seriously, with modern nano-techonology making mobile devices smaller and faster, more efficient, we have infinite facts and figures at our fingertips. At all times we are connected not just to our circle of friends but to the World Wide Web. And according to Sherry Turkle, with each generation that passes we don’t want to let go; we don’t want to be disconnected. As a responsible and mindful member of Gen Y I feel it is my duty to step forward and admit ‘My name is Valentina and I am addicted to my iPhone’.

But hey it’s not all bad right? I mean the incredibly funny comedian Louis C.K. understands that technology is AMAZING! Caution: Very Explicit language:

But I digress; the point I am trying to make is that mobile devices have changed the face of the world, as we knew it. In 2010, bbc.co.uk posted an article stating there are over 5 billion mobile connections worldwide, that 30 million phones are sold in the UK every year and that 47% of those mobile connections are in the Asia-Pacific region. On a trip to my home country of the Philippines in 2010, I was astounded that each member of my family, who could barely make ends meet, owned a mobile phone and used it prolifically. Of course the pricing schedule is vastly different over there and the quality of the phones is not up to par for us blessed Westerners but still, in a country where clean drinking water and nutritious vegetables are scarce resources, every single person owns a mobile phone.

But not only does everyone own a phone, with the ,abundance of mobile use, innovation is now in the hands of the people. In 2008 Jan Chipchase, researcher for Nokia, hosted a TEDTalk about the ability of the mobile network to implement the simplest of services to those without. He spoke of social geniuses in Uganda who have developed a system using mobile networks to bring ‘rudimentary banking structures to places where no banking infrastructure exists. [Where] even if there could be banking infrastructure, it wouldn’t be considered viable because there is no customer base’.

That was in 2008, since then the iPhone, iPad, Android and other such technological whiz-bangs have spurned on the App Explosion, another product of social innovation. It works well for us consumers, for tech-savvy and observant people to simply see a need and develop an app to change the world. Everything I can think of now has an app; banks, hospitals, universities, not-for-profits, supermarkets, weather stations, taxi companies, public transport services – everything!

Flurry, an American company that provides app developers with tools to measure how much people are using their app have created this incredible graph showing the exponential growth of app use between January 2009 to now, as well as what particular type of app was most popular at the time.

So it’s clear that we all have mobile devices, we all use them and we all use them for really useful and productive things like looking at cats.

Source: http://cdnimg.visualizeus.com/thumbs/e6/19/box,cat,funny,maru-e61910bb3e4de8696ad18f2a5e8eba57_h.jpg

It can’t just be me – there are billions of images and videos of cats on the net and I swear I only look them up 5 or 6 times a day.

But again, I have wandered off track. Mobile devices, changed world, interconnectedness. As Sherry Turkle so eloquently puts it ‘we celebrate our technologies because people are frightened by the world we've made. The economy isn't going right; there's global warming. In times like that, people imagine science and technology will be able to get it right’. Sherry makes a great point and I’m inclined to agree. Apps won’t fix the problems we face. As a society I think we are allowing technology to happen to us because it’s so easy to float down the river and go along with it. But this immediate access to information, this immediate of adoption of ideas has changed our view of the world and our place in it. It was meant to make it smaller and connect us, but instead it’s made it bigger and disconnected us.

We look at digital images of people on a screen thinking it can replace real interaction. We read books and magazines on a screen even though it is a poor substitute for a real book. And we read snippets of headlines on an elegantly designed news app thinking this can replace real hard-hitting journalism. I know I am guilty even though I try hard to be present. I know the tram-full of people I ride to work with is guilty because they have that same glazed look in their eyes. But I won’t end on a doom & gloom high horse ‘cause that’s not my style.

Check out this light-hearted article from CNN about how smartphones changed lives and this one about clever people who use mobile devices to truly give others a hand up. Oh and here’s one more cute picture to send you on your cheery way – I couldn’t resist!

Source: http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/fashion/daily/2013/08/09/09-watermelon-baby.o.jpg/a_4x.jpg

So tell me, what are your thoughts on the evolution of the mobile phone? And the development of the mobile generation? Are you hopeful, cynical, blasé, hangry? I want to know..!