By SCOTT DEWING
Published: April 2009
MUCH TO THE CHAGRIN of the very intelligent but somewhat analogish and Ludditesque Mrs. Dewing, I recently purchased an iPhone. Apple’s iPhone is a beautiful combination of functional design and high-tech wizardry. That’s not me endorsing the product nor the beginning of a product review. It’s just me simply saying that the iPhone totally rocks.
Mrs. Dewing, however, did not share my enthusiasm.*
“Why would you want to have access to your email all the time? And please, do you really need access to the Internet 24/7?”
Those were fair questions. But after 17 years of marriage, I could see the trap that was being laid for me. If I said anything, it had better be good because the next question—the real question and perhaps the only question that really mattered to the czaress of household finances—would simply be: “How much?” That one was going to be coming at me like a heat-seeking missile.
No, in all truthfulness, I really didn’t want to have access to my email (both personal and business) at all times. And no, I didn’t have to have access to the Internet at all times.
But now that I do, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to imagine functioning without it. I would be a liar if I told you that I didn’t find this growing dependency to be mildly disturbing. I must admit that my iPhone has quickly become an extension of myself, a self that is increasingly becoming a digitally tethered drone. I fly through my day under the control and direction of my iPhone. It wakes me up in the morning, feeds me a steady stream of news, information and music while I drink coffee, promptly delivers my most recent email messages, dispatches me to meetings that I’d otherwise forget, and tells me what I’m supposed to do next so that I don’t sit on my ass and do nothing.
I’m not alone in being sucked into the iPhone’s digital vortex. Last year, Apple sold 13.7 million of these sleek suckers worldwide. And even in the midst of global economic collapse and predictions of domestic doom and gloom, Apple’s sales were up 6 percent in the last quarter of 2008.
I carry my iPhone everywhere. Ask me any question and I’ll likely be able to tell you the answer in moments. Of course, it’s not really me who knows the answer, it’s the World Wide Web. Like my iPhone itself, I’m just a conduit, an interface if you will, for the delivery of information.
I’ve noticed that with the aid of an iPhone and the crutch of always-on access to the Web, I’ve begun to retain less and less information in my brain. Like a computer’s Random Access Memory (RAM), information is held only long enough in my brain to be processed and passed on before it is dumped from memory to make room for the next batch of bits. For example, just now I was trying to remember the name of a certain German electronica musician. All I could remember was that his first name started with a “J”. A quick Google search gave me the name that my brain couldn’t recall: Jens Buchert. In seconds, I’ve found the music track, “Mélange Électrique”, I was seeking. Don’t speak French? Me neither. But just a second while I consult the Web…okay, here is how that translates: “electric mixture”. And “mélange” looks familiar. Oh, here it is in the English dictionary: “a mixture often of incongruous elements”.
The line between my memory and the Web’s has begun to blur more than ever now that I’ve taken the plunge into the “smartphone” sphere. And worse: it might be making me dumb (or dumber as the intelligent Mrs. Dewing might claim as I mindlessly poke and tap on my iPhone’s touch-screen).
The idea that the Web is dumbing us down was addressed in Nicholas Carr’s excellent essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? published last year in The Atlantic. “For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind,” Carr wrote. “The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded…But that boon comes at a price…what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”
Indeed, I feel as though my brain is becoming rewired to expect and only accept information being delivered in rapid bursts of bits. So much so that lately I’ve been haunted by the phrase “the medium is the message” coined by media theorist Marshall McLuhan in his landmark book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man published in 1964.
“In a culture like ours,” McLuhan wrote, “…it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
This, I think, gets at the heart of what I’ve been experiencing lately as I interface more and more with the new technology of the smartphone and the medium of the the Web. They truly are “extensions” of ourselves and thus the medium of the messages we receive and perceive.
What does this all mean? What are the possible personal and social consequences? I do not know. But I do know one thing for sure: I won’t find the answers to those and other deep questions amidst the drone emanating from the Web and through the tiny screen of my iPhone. To answer these types of questions, I’ll need to go for a long walk and leave my iPhone at home so that I can do the one thing that all these new technologies can’t do for me: think.
*She now owns and loves her very own iPhone. LOL. 🙂
@scottdewing 