I have often stated here that there's an intriguing similarity between catering to Personal Mobility with a smartphone (versatile-bridging distances virtually) and catering to Personal Mobility with let's call it a smart auto-mobile (bridging distances in person, real time)... You might think of this as stating the obvious.
Whether stating the obvious, or not, you’re correct with this observation.
What less often happens is taking apart
why the relationship is there and why it is seemingly obvious.
From a sociological vantage, people in cars and people staring down their phones, when walking down a sidewalk or inside a store, share another trait: both technological paradigms wall people away from one another as people co-occupy a public space, a commons. One is literal (the private vehicle); the other is cognitive/attention-oriented. One presents itself in public rights-of-way; the other presents in both public rights-of-way (like sidewalks, crosswalks, city parks, transit stations, etc.) and also private spaces of public and semi-public gathering and consumption (like businesses and shopping zones).
For each paradigm/means of walling off from one another shares a relationship uncomfortably near a 1:1 ratio of isolation and, ironically, loneliness. There is also a near-par relationship with an escalation of social segmentation and polarization.
From a socio-historical perspective, the propagation of both paradigms, also ironically, made their chief propagators enormously rich in just a few decades. As well, economists regard both as economic revolutions. (Sociologists, meanwhile, recognize the cost of a handful of entities getting so rich, so completely, benefits those entities, at great consequence to the health of society’s fabric. It’s highly asymmetrical and not a benign event.)
For the private car, these were the automotive companies; automotive accessories (like tires); fuel suppliers (not only oil companies, but the rise of fast food); and construction companies (commissioned to build and maintain infrastructure).
For the handheld device, these have been the major platforms by Apple and Google; the phone suppliers (Samsung, HTC, Apple); telecoms (4G LTE/5G infrastructure companies); and energy suppliers (both carbon-positive and those approaching carbon-neutral).
The long-tail effects for both seem to point to less obvious, slower to manifest hits on public health, natural ecosystems, and beyond.
It required nearly fifty years of painstaking research to definitively find negative sociological and health side-effects of the private automobile: shattered, destroyed communities; permanent brain damage from childhood ingestion of airborne TEL (tetraethyllead, or lead); cardiopulmonary disease (soot particulates, chemical smog byproducts like nitrogen oxides); disruptive impacts on built form, land use, and ecosystems; and negative impacts on social and geopolitical health (aforementioned isolation; increased aggression as finite use-resources, such as roads, grew permanently congested; and literal wars and blood spilled over fuel stock access).
The same degree of painstaking research with handheld devices in public and private space has only been underway for maybe a decade, at most. Provisional, correlative findings seem to be pointing to: a positive relationship with increasing loneliness/isolation reported in people’s lives; escalations in distracted driving incidents; an increasing probability of the brain’s reward-response systems matching those of chemical addiction with the uptick of scroll-based, algorithm-fed social media; and more. The aforementioned will continue to bear data for more definitive findings, but it will take time, possibly another decade or two, and even more negative, sociological findings may emerge as long-term data begins to amass to be analyzed statistically.
Maybe, but IMO if Ive and Cook had gone over this, they would have taken a different approach. What personally intrigues me, is that there's a 'distinct unversality' (for lack of a better word) to the smartphone, like there is to let's say Einstein's E=MC2 - meaning: if Apple under Steve Jobs hadn't come up with it, would someone else... eventually?
Not necessarily, but it’s also something we can’t test empirically from our spatial-temporal vantage. That is: we are locked on this timeline and in this universe.
We can’t test an assessment of a world in which, say, a consequential event in 2001 never happened, thereby never putting new urgency on the adoption of 3G mobile services to integrate always-on, geo-tracking protocols.
Although the core function of adding location services to the protocol was presented as a way to assist public services, like paramedic and police calls, to find a person in distress quickly, two things happened instead.
One was a widespread acceptance of a surveillance society, of which a geo-aware handhelds were but one piece of the composite picture. The other was tech companies, several scrambling to restructure their internet-integrated business plans after the 2000–01 dot-crash recession, which honed in on and prioritized the potential to integrate then-discrete products — PDAs, cellular phones, portable computers with internet wifi) — into a unified product (called “convergence”), and to move toward a new business model of making device users the product (rather than the hardware, software, and web services being sold as products).
This means we also can’t test a world in which, ca. 1991–92, public commissions actually
did classify wireless telephony as a public infrastructure under regulatory oversight and public access the way wired telephony had from its adoption. We can’t know whether the mobile phone would continue to evolve as an even better mobile phone, without the internet appliance aspect taking over entirely — or, at least not in a way we know it now.
We can’t test an assessment of a world in which, say, by 1998, regulatory enforcement of legislation in the absence of a DMCA (and its geopolitical younger siblings) never came to fruition — meaning, changes which gave rise to online streaming subscriptions and microtransactions (to, say, buy an MP3) never came to pass. We can’t know if a DMCA failing with no viable successor would have relegated the internet to a research tool whose presence in everyone’s lives might have still happened, but without tech startups and web advertising expenditures pouring trillions of dollars into the wholesle commercial overtaking of the entire medium.
So no: I don’t think this was “E=MC2”-inevitable, as this compares a literal law of this universe’s physics to mercurial decision making consequences which human beings choose (and chose) to make, both individually and institutionally (at the governance and also the economic model level wherein a society either welcomes, rejects, or picks and chooses only those parts which work).
I do think external factors — by external actors, all human — affect how and why tech (and its products, services, and paradigms) propagates as it has.
That means they are also not a
fait accompli — not set in stone forever and not inevitable, unlike, say, a law of physics.
But the important thinking and reckoning about the consequential impacts of tech almost always ends up, in true human nature and form, being remedial, revisionist, and looking rearward at what has already happened (and the impacts those had), rather than to do the examination prudently
before careering headlong into a major, paradigm-changing direction with a kind of blissful ignorance toward how it will consequentially alter the morrow.
