To be honest I think cellphones have made the world an overall worse place. Already some places are pushing hard to make them mandatory for certain services, like two-factor authentication -- several banks already do this.
This makes it harder for people who want the freedom of not using a mobile phone.
Mobile phones also have caused people to be less present in social situations and they provide too much information. There's less time just to think and be a person.
I know we have many conveniences with smartphones and cellphones but I do not believe they are worth it and humanity would be better off without them.
There are two services 'smartphones' are delivering on.
Firstly, the ability to make calls remotely, and secondly to run application that can access the internet.
The ability to make a phone call remotely is amazing, but the use of that phone is no different to a wired one. If you don't want to answer the call, then don't.
The second issue is that people get sucked into dopamine pumping applications on their internet connect smartphone, that is a completely different issue.
> To be honest I think cellphones have made the world an overall worse place.
Only cellphones? What about the internet? It has made the world a worse place by shortening distances, not requiring you to get out of bed in order to buy something, or even to go to work. I only get out of the house once a week now. And don't get me started about social media.
In fact, you could argue that the whole industrial society has made the world a lot worse. And that's what the Unabomber manifesto [1] argued.
Cell phones are just a tool that can be used in any way. The companies that designed the software and platforms that runs on them and they connect to made the internet a worse place.
I mean if you frame things hard enough anything can be value-neutral to some degree, but I'm gradually turning on the idea of a smartphone in general. I simply do not think that every human should carry around an always-on internet-connected device everywhere they go. It's neat in theory, but it hasn't worked out very well.
Doesn't mean I don't want non-smartphone mobile computers to exist though. Believe me, I'd love to strap a 4G modem to my GPD MicroPC. Hell, in theory it could make a decent phone if the market for modems wasn't so awful. But even then, I don't carry around any device the way I used to compulsively carry around a smartphone. Maybe I'm just being dramatic, but it really feels like there's something insidious about the way smartphones are, and I don't think it's all just that the software on them is manipulative. I honestly think that it might literally be a little too convenient.
> It's neat in theory, but it hasn't worked out very well.
That's not a fact and it really is your opinion. The fact that I can now go any buy tickets for an event while sitting in a boring taxi for the last 30 minutes is anlofe saver.
> That's not a fact and it really is your opinion. The fact that I can now go any buy tickets for an event while sitting in a boring taxi for the last 30 minutes is anlofe saver.
Yeah, convenience is basically the common theme of the smartphone. It's a phone, it's a camera, it's an internet communicator, it's a personal music player. I'm not downplaying how useful smartphones things CAN be, yet in practice, I'm often surprised at how utterly unimportant and banal they usually are. It can do so much, and yet somehow it usually boils down to killing time and buying things.
Maybe this bothers me so much simply because it feels like it never had to be this way. There was a diverse world of PDAs, smartphones and UMPCs, but Steve Jobs made a killer demo for the iPhone and the world never recovered. Every mobile device ever since has dreamed of being the iPhone. Useless? Definitely not. But why can't we graft all of these useful features onto something with more utility?
Of course, we can, it's just that nobody is asking for it. The closest approximation I have is sticking a USB LTE modem into my GPD MicroPC. It's fantastic and serves many of the "utility" functions that the internet can provide, and the battery life is pretty good too. It's less tempting to pull out just for the sake of killing time, and it's honestly comfortable enough to thumb-type on that I can use it for some real, if inefficient, productivity tasks. And it's got a real desktop operating system on it. (Well, insofar as much as Linux counts.)
But a lot of the time, I just wind up leaving the house with, well, no devices. It's fine. In some cases it can be a little boring. But you know, it doesn't hurt that bad being a little bored here or there. It reminds me of childhood. it really feels alright to just plain be a little bored once in a while. So sometimes I take a walk, and just don't grab anything, and clear my head for a bit. And if other people don't like/want that, that's fine by me.
But... still, even if people love their smartphones, it doesn't necessarily mean that it has been a good relationship for them.
This was not really the case when cellphones were not yet also smartphones. Sure, you may have checked your text messages now and then, but the phone was not a constant attentiongrabber.
True, but smartphones are essentially a logical and inevitable conclusion of cellphones in a society that is not cautious towards technological devleopment.
The first ones certainly weren't as you describe, but then again they were purely a phone, and nothing else. Not even basic texting. Certainly no data. Their only drawback was their enormous size and the high per minute voice charges.
It’s so crazy that he’s lived long enough to watch his invention go mainstream and now reach the point where it is basically about to be obsoleted.
I, like so many, am at the point where the “cell phone” part of my cell phone needs to go away — the signal to noise for voice isn’t worth it. It’s basically just junk mail at this point.
Of course I want voice, but it’s stepped back to a distant fifth or sixth for utility on my mobile devices, and no longer the reason I carry cell phones.
Of course the invention is intrinsically far more than voice, but it’s interesting that the inventor has lived long enough to watch the utility of his original vision and invention decline (as voice calls specifically).
I wonder if there is an enshitification phase for all technologies that become profoundly commercially successful.
A fairer characterization might be that it’s a more marginal but no less essential use.
We don’t rely on voice calls to communicate at a distance as much as we used to because there are other mediums the modern smartphone can access for that application, but a lot of us still do rely on voice calls on our smartphones for communications of some kind whether it’s WebEx meetings, Discord calls or straight up POTS emulation.
If I didn't have a cellphone for voice, I'd still have a landline (which would actually be better, just not worth the added cost) in which case, other than when traveling which I do less of these days, I'd basically never use my cell phone for a voice call. I do video calls from my computer and never use Discord. Short exchanges of information/reminders are almost always texts.
So I'm pretty much at the point where voice conversations on my cell are not an essential use especially if I'm not on an extended trip.
“We still have a way to go. I think phones are too complicated now. The way we use them is not very natural. Holding a phone up to your ear with your elbow opening is not what you’d call a very natural way of talking. We have a way to go. I think that the cell phone is still in its infancy. I think that the children of today’s cell phone, if I could use that analogy, are going to be used for things like connecting to your body, measuring things on your body, understanding when you’re starting to get sick. But talking to a computer somewhere that does a physical examination of you — not every year — but every 30 seconds. I believe that the cell phone is going to be an important part of eliminating disease. And I really mean that.”
> Holding a phone up to your ear with your elbow opening is not what you’d call a very natural way of talking.
On the order of half the people I see using a cell phone already do not do this. They have an in-ear thingamijig with a mic somewhere on the cable, or they have the phone on a surface in front of them and are using the speaker.
This makes it harder for people who want the freedom of not using a mobile phone.
Mobile phones also have caused people to be less present in social situations and they provide too much information. There's less time just to think and be a person.
I know we have many conveniences with smartphones and cellphones but I do not believe they are worth it and humanity would be better off without them.