What kind of smartphone are you?
Technology rules not just what we do these days, but who we are. The gadget you take out of your pocket or briefcase when making a phone call, or when taking notes at a meeting, or when checking the score in the latest football game, will tell everyone exactly what kind of person you are.
An interesting perspective on this was considered yesterday in BBC2′s Newsnight programme. Their economics editor Paul Mason looked at the impact of social networking on the British general election; but as part of that he pointed out that social networking was now largely conducted on mobile devices, and for many that meant Apple’s iPhone. Politicians on the other hand were still largely Blackberry users, and this meant that the nature of their mobile device use was fundamentally different from that of the politically engaged general public, who were more likely to be iPhone junkies. Blackberrys, he suggested, were modelled on the idea of distribution of command and instruction, whereas iPhones were based on interactive opinion building and information sharing.
And so what does all this mean? It seems that who we are is now increasingly connected with the technology we use. The gadgets become extensions of ourselves and we become extensions of them; they are part of our intuition rather than just instruments of utility. Companies that ‘get’ that, as Apple undoubtedly does, will dominate in the future. And people who ‘get’ that will be the dominant political forces. And right now in the UK, there is at least a chance that the mood of this election will have been fashioned by Twitter, Facebook and the iPhone. Interesting.
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This entry was posted on April 27, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under politics, society, technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: Blackberry, general election, iPhone, smartphones, social networking
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April 27, 2010 at 3:34 pm
“The gadget you take out of your pocket or briefcase when making a phone call, or when taking notes at a meeting, or when checking the score in the latest football game, will tell everyone exactly what kind of person you are.”
I wish it was that easy.
April 27, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Yeah – there’d be only about four types of person.
April 27, 2010 at 4:37 pm
I have a ‘dumb’ phone…but it doesn’t stop me twittering on and on…..!
As for the election- well because of their fixation with the three British-nationalist parties many of the reports on the BBC are missing the stuff going on in some of the other 4 constituent nations of the UK, although they did briefly mention that the SNP used twitter to raise the money needed to make a legal challenge against the BBC Trust’s decision to exclude the governing parties of Wales and Scotland from the televised debates. They needed 50,000 pounds and raised it via twitter in 24 hours.
Before you ask, i gave nothing, being neither a member of a political party nor a resident so this is a completely unbiased comment!