Marcella Caruso | Staff Writer
I have never felt so helpless as I did for the five days I survived with a broken iPhone. Seeing as I use my phone for pretty much everything, I knew that I had to find a Phone repair store fast!
I had just moved into Halls, Freshers Week was beginning, and then the screen stopped working. It was every bit as horrible as one would imagine. No Google maps to tell me I was going in the complete opposite direction of College, no DublinBus app to show me how to get to IKEA, no Facebook to tell me when Freshers Week events were, no iMessage to make plans with the people I had known just barely long enough to consider “friends,” and no camera with which to capture the Freshers Week festivities. I didn’t even have the clock on the front screen. I had to wear an actual watch.
While part of me wants to give myself a pat on the back for surviving Amishly for five days in the twenty-first century, another part questions why that was a source of pride in the first place.
These days it’s almost rebellious to consider going somewhere without a fully-charged phone, ready to aid you with directions, Google, or Spotify at a moment’s notice. You can pretty much do anything on your phone these days. You can even use an iPhone to open your garage door. This is how dependent we are when it comes to technology. But we might as well use it to our advantage.
While that level panic and dependency might seem extreme, it’s far from rare. I often see friends leaving campus early or completely skipping events because their phones are dying. The result is that people regularly carry their chargers around with them throughout the day, knowing that at some point their battery will run dangerously low, and not wanting to risk being phoneless. These days it’s almost rebellious to consider going somewhere without a fully-charged phone, ready to aid you with directions, Google, or Spotify at a moment’s notice.
As many parents are fond of reminding their children, “people survived without smartphones for thousands of years.” And yes, I’m sure they did, but not in a world built on the assumption that a large majority of young people are using smartphones. It has even been incorporated into the student university experience with things like Blackboard, Socrative, and Hive – all of which we are expected to easily access and all of which we would struggle to manage without.
Smartphone technology can be great, obviously. With data, users can search for information, check their email, find directions, talk with friends or family, look up information, or use any one of the millions of apps available. But, like anything that makes our lives easier, we can quickly and unknowingly grow dependent.
Society also adapted to the growing market of smartphone users and left those without them, even temporarily, at a loss.
The problem with smartphones is that they are now so pervasive that not only is it simply annoying to manage without them as a crutch, but society has also adapted to the growing market of smartphone users and left those without them, even temporarily, at a loss. Even from a corporate perspective, the popularity of smartphones is so strong that companies who failed to adapt – or adapted too late – are getting the ax. Nokia, for example, which once dominated the mobile phone industry, officially stopped producing phones as a result of their failure to modernise.
So, smartphones, for better or worse, are becoming an inevitability in our society. While their mystical powers give us a sense of power and independence that no other generation has experienced, all of that disappears when the power shuts down.
If you are looking for true independence, there is nothing more empowering (and terrifying) than heroically braving the smartphone world without one. All you need is a watch, your brain, your flatmate’s spare basic phone with the language set to French, and the confidence to approach random strangers and ask them how to find the 140 bus.
Photo by Marc Mueller
