The best description of a smartphone I can think of came to me a couple days ago while I was tapping through The New York Times mobile app on my iPhone's slick surface.
At the very heart of both its design and intended use, an iPhone is basically an amalgamation of a virtually infinite number of distractions into a small electronic brick.
The sheer number of things you can use to occupy your time boggles the mind. To list them here is unnecessary. Everyone who owns one of these personal distraction devices will know what I’m talking about.
Through some very complex process that is so “out there” it might as well be considered a form of magic, the tech wizards at Apple were able to condense the following into one smooth slab of plastic: the internet, all electronically available music (through iTunes or other methods), every major newspaper, a large swath of printed literature and an unthinkable number of addictive video games.
This device, more than any tangible device before or since, has the possibility to be every thing to every person.
It can be a conversation partner (Siri) or conversation enabler (the relatively little-used phone aspect of the brick).
It can be a newsstand, a bookstore and a book, a computer (which, in fact, it is), an arcade parlor, an exercise buddy, a notepad and many, many more things.
I won’t attempt to persuade you that using this machine to its fullest extent is wholly “worse” than going to an actual newsstand or using an actual library.
Because, whether you like it or not, a device as small and graspable as the iPhone is changing the world we live in. They are starving the physical places where one used to buy books and music out of existence.
They only reason the aforementioned concepts exist is because they have some use to the individual or society.
Now that the iPhone has lovingly encompassed all of these concepts within itself, there will be a smaller place in the world for those physical constructions, and, therefore, those who live by them.
Soon, the idea of living without an iPhone will become a hardship too steep to overcome. Already, not having one (or having a lower-tech type of phone) is something like an oddity. Someone who continues to hold on to their flip-phone (or even a BlackBerry) is seen as someone either ignorant or stubborn in the face of overwhelming technology.
So, what is to be done? Should anything be done? So many people have already embraced the position that smartphones (as well as all social media, apps and the rest of it) are a scourge on society, but no serious action has been taken by any of them.
The ability to do everything right now has too tight a grip on the public for those bleating pseudo-Cassandra types to have any real say in the conversation.
Others see them as an inevitable development into a purely electronic future, where the loss of the tangible (bookstores, record shops, etc.) is a small price to pay for the sheer amount of conveniences these small bricks provide.
As for me, it all comes down to choice. On one level, it’s a mug's game either way: these smartphones are too useful for them not to bend society to their whim. Sooner or later, their dominance will be too pronounced to argue about. (We might already be at that point.)
But, as of now, it is the individual’s prerogative to choose how long he or she stays in the world of the physical, where one can exchange paper money for a physical disk or book. The main advantage of this is the ability to meet others. You aren't going to meet someone with the same music or film or book taste as you by browsing through the vast iTunes library.
Living like this doesn’t require throwing your working smartphone into a bin.
All it requires is a healthy sense of when to click the lock button on your device, put it in your pocket and raise your eyes up to see the living world.