Smartphones Are Boring. That’s Good!
When technologies get boring is when they become truly interesting. We’re just starting to see the cultural value of smartphones.
Maria felt the vibration of her phone in her pocket. The kind that meant there was actually a phone call coming in. As in, someone wanted to talk to her. Like a conversation. Maria ignored the call, not even bothering to take the phone out of her pocket. Calls were so annoying. Texts so much easier.
This scenario plays out around the world everyday, across many cultures. A survey recently shows that about a quarter of people aged 18–34 don’t answer their phones for a voice call. Many people think a phone call means a scam or bad news. Our relationship with phones, vi smartphones, is changing.
Most people think the first smartphone was the Blackberry, or perhaps the iPhone? The first smartphone was produced by IBM in 1994, called the Simon. It had a touch screen and several apps, including, best of all, the ability to send a fax!
It seems almost impossible to imagine our world without smartphones. There’s an estimated 6.7 billion smartphones in the world today with almost 70% market penetration globally. Consider that there’s about 8 billion people.
We’ve even created a word within culture, “nomophobia” which is a fear of not having ones phone with them. And other terms like FOMO (fear of missing out), doom-scrolling and ghosting. We even use text terms in real life (IRL) like LOL or LOLZ. These are important sociocultural signals.
Smartphones aren’t really even phones, they’ve become cultural artefacts. Deeply embedded in societies, changing social norms and behaviours. In the days of landline phones, you called someone, hoping they’d be there to pick up. You’d have to plan a time to meet and by golly, you got there. Today, we can text when we’re running late without even touching our phone, using voice. Being late is now largely accepted as a social norm.
Researchers have found that for most people, their phone is always within about three feet, or a metre, of their body. The two most common things we have carried with us for decades are our keys and wallets or purses. Now we’ve added the phone.
Over 70% of Americans say they spend more time with their phones than with their lovers. 57% of Americans say they’re addicted to their phones. These stats are American, but are likely fairly similar in other countries.
Over the past fitted or so years, marketers have boldly proclaimed that this year, whichever it was, would be the year of the mobile! Get ready marketers and companies, it’s goodbye laptops and desktops! Except that never quite happened. Nor will it.
Smartphones have become, slowly, as major technologies tend to do, a cultural artefact so deeply entwined with our lives in so many aspects, have they become. So much so that smartphones, like the telephone, radio and TV became before it, became boring. And when technologies become boring is when they become most interesting.
When Technologies Become Cultural Artefacts
Not all technologies become cultural artefacts. But what does that even mean and why is it relevant and important? What does it mean that smartphones are boring?
Technologies become boring when they’ve reached a high degree of cultural acceptance. When the majority sees more benefits that downsides and when social norms and behaviours have changed in lockstep with the technology. That it is just accepted.
So whey then, does a technology that’s boring, then become interesting? This has to do with the ratchet effect in how technologies evolve. The smartphone has, in essence, become a platform on which more interesting things can be done and more social value delivered in more meaningful ways.
Both Apple and Google have introduced their versions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their smartphones. We can’t be sure how that will play out, but people do find value in various uses of AI, mostly via voice agents like Siri or in the past, Alexa and using Google products.
As a technology becomes boring and new technologies are layered onto to it (ratchet effect) it also becomes a cultural artefact. This means that it is seen as a ubiquitous technology that delivers some degree of survival value to a culture, not just as entertainment or social signalling.
Until recently, many smartphones sent social signals (to some degree, they still do, but not as much). Having the latest iPhone or Samsung sent a signal to others that you had money to spend, that you had a degree of wealth and you saw yourself in a certain social light.
But smartphones have become largely the same, all variations on a rectangle. Improvements today are incremental gains in processing power, cameras and software. But it’s not the phone itself that is playing the interesting role. The phone itself is boring. What it can do, is interesting.
Smartphones have become a cultural artefact because they have enabled us to do so many different things. Taking pictures and videos is a cultural act of creation. The added value is being able to adit them, share them and tell stories via images. An important means of humans creating shared realities.
Too, they connect to many other technologies. From our cars to thermostats, appliances and smart speakers in our homes. Smartphones have been the key underlying technology to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, of which there are nearly 70 billion in the world today.
Where once YouTube, Instagram Reels, Vines, TikTok and other video and image channels were highly social in nature, they are more like broadcast entertainment channels. People find less value in mass public social media and more value in private, locked down channels like WhatsApp, Telegram and messaging apps and services.
That people are turning to more private, less surveilled (for both commercial and government purposes) tools is a sociocultural signal that we are beginning to reframe how we engage with one another through digital spaces.
What About AI Gadgets?
Some have suggested that with the rise of Artificial intelligence (AI), like Generative AI tools and the gadgets they’ve enabled, that the smartphones days are numbered. Tis is unlikely. Earlier this year saw the release of rabbit r1, AI device, which has largely flatlined. Then there’s AI pendants and tools to record conversations or display via projection on your hand or a surface like the Humane AI pin.
While some of these devices will find successful niche markets, replacing a boring technology like the smartphone is incredibly hard to do and unlikely. None of these AI devices have the rang of uses of a smartphone and making the case to ditch your phone is a failing task at best.
The Future of the Smartphone
It is a technology likely to see a long term use in sociocultural systems around the world. There’s not much, seemingly, that can be done with the form factor of a rectangle, but that’s not nearly as important as all the other uses and impacts of smartphones.
Over time, we will resolve societal issues such as dopamine addiction, data tracking and privacy, social norms and behaviours. Generative AI tools and uses will get better. New peripheral devices will come along. We may see the increased acceptance of Augmented Reality (AR) glasses, but they will rely on the smartphone as a connecting point
Smartphones enable many other technologies to work and deliver perceived cultural value. Much like the car enabled new ways to move about our world, evolving to include tractor trailers and specialized vehicles.
Even though the more modern smartphone has been around for nearly two decades, these are still nascent devices. Where they are interesting is the new possibilities we are discovering with them and the social norms and behaviours they are impacting. As boring as they may be, they’re just starting to get interesting.