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The people who are economically disadvantaged enough that acquiring a new or replacing a broken smart handheld is just fricking hard, The wording here (and fur
by kleiba 13y ago
The people who are economically disadvantaged enough that acquiring a new or replacing a broken smart handheld is just fricking hard,
The wording here (and further down in the article) makes it sound as if it's an undisputed fact that everybody wants a smart phone and the only reason not to have one is an economical one. But some people just choose not to own a smart phone, or any mobile phone for that matter. Reasons for that include e.g. privacy concerns, but also that to some people a phone would just not create enough of a benefit. This, however, might change of course if the trend identified in the article (more and more services are substantially harder to use without a phone) continues.
will find themselves burdened always having only secondary access to the world: always having to type 20 digit numbers though hostile phone menu trees to finish topping up, having to go to a specific location to find the right form and find it is out of stock this week and wasting a trip, carry little top-up cards and keys they may lose, not being able to remotely check on their homes or work, not reaping the benefits of a world going digital.
Granted, I live in a country that is 10 years behind compared to the US in terms of technical pervasion, but I don't think I know anyone who uses their phone to remotely check on their homes or work. As far as I can tell, people around me still use phones mostly to make calls (shocking, I know) and (the tech-savvy ones) to do Google searches. That's by far the lion share.
I think the next generation though, i.e., today's teenagers actually do use apps, but for the 30+ in my immediate surroundings that's a rare exception. This is certainly different in the states.
Therefore the perception over here is a bit different from countries like the US or Japan where technology is embraced more willingly or widely. But the effects described in the article might well make it to other countries as well, if only with a bit of a delay. But I don't think that that's too dramatic. I personally think that many of the advantages of the digital age are things that are not crucial to living a happy life. Apps etc. can make a lot of things a lot easier or more convenient, but you can just as easy live a life where the things that are made easier do not matter all that much. Consequently, the digital divide described in the article might become a reality (or not) but it remains to be seen if its influence on the average person's life is more than marginal.
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago"I personally think that many of the advantages of the digital age are things that are not crucial to living a happy life." Given the causal link between relative productivity and happiness, I'd depreciate the odds of living happily without modern connectivity as the value of that connectivity is furthered.
- Touche 13y agoAgreed, just as people can live today without electricity (by choice) they do so knowing that they are detached from society to a great degree, and that won't be any different from people who chose to live without modern communication tools.
- kleiba 13y agoI do think there's still a difference between choosing to live without electricity vs. without smart phones. They're similar in that they don't address immediate survival needs, but rather are there to make life more comfortable. But electricity is a much more basic service while smart phones are an order of magnitude more high-level. As a result, a lot of the benefits that are provided by smart phones have competitors (office land line, desktop computers, etc.) which cannot provide all the advantages of smart phones (and are not integrated into a single device) but in sum make it much easier, I would say, to live a modern life without a smart phone than to live one without electricity.
- gurkendoktor 13y agoIs there a proven causal link between smartphones and productivity? I can imagine that managers love them, but what about everyone else? Not saying that they're bad, but I think for most people they're more like Facebook. Nobody would ever claim that Facebook improved humanity's productivity, but one can still feel "locked out" without it.
- jimmaswell 13y agoI could claim facebook improved social productivity. Made it easier to organize events, for one thing.
- joe_the_user 13y agoLiving in the US, most of the people I know don't use their phones for much besides email and text. Some use them for Facebook, some for pdf reading or the odd Google search (when mobile, I think there are exactly only ten things one has a reason to search for, unless one's playing a trivia game, hence the ads). I don't know anyone who uses their smart in a way that's more than a combination laptop/dumb-phone. And usually a rather limited combination. Admittedly, I'm now outside early adopter circles. I have a smart phone. In practice, I have no reason not to have a "feature phone" instead. Edit: In relation to original article, I think the idea that the world is going to "appified" rapidly is implausible. For example, having a separate remote for your apartment's gate may be a hassle but it's not a hassle for the apartment's owners and so they have little incentive to spend money to universalize this. Smart Phone only services may appear spread a bit but they have no more likelihood of becoming universal than Facebook-only services.