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Ok - I’m someone who finds the mere idea of the mobile pretty amazing: Wow! You can walk down the street, hold a thing to your ear, and talk to someone – And the ‘thing’ doesn’t have to be a tin can with a string attached, and the ‘someone’ doesn’t have to be the length of a string away - They could be in Kathmandu, or Moat, and you could be wherever. That’s always been ‘wow’ enough for me. Which is why I’ve always had the most basic model. Then old mobile broke. I carefully chose this new, silver biscuit one on the basis that a shop I wandered into offered to give it to me for free. The brochure describes it as having ‘handy features to help you capture and share your stories, access and transfer essential data, and stay entertained’. Got that? It helps me capture and share my stories – Wow, what am I now? A one-person media-empire? Via this portal my plain old ‘calls and texts’ become ‘the access and transfer of essential data’! Wow! A device that takes my correspondence more seriously than I do! And it allows me address that problem that’s been niggling since the searing light of this mortal coil first pierced my nascent eye: How the bugger to STAY ENTERTAINED. Because not only is staying entertained a core existential poser for each one of us – but isn’t it exactly what’s on our minds when we think ‘I need a new mobile’. A phone that phones is all very well, but how will it shape up when I need me some entertaining? That is the question, now, apparently. And though I wasn’t asking it myself, I now have a mobile with camera, video, games, media player, radio, maps, blah etc., supported by 217 MB of internal memory. Which if my memory serves me correctly, is 54 times more Megs than the first big, whole, yes, really big, computer I owned in the 90s. That’s the nub of it actually - it’s not really a phone anymore, is it? You could say a mobile phone really was a mobile phone when it was the size of brick and enabled one do three simple things: Make calls. Receive calls. Look like a prat. Now the mobile is actually a mini, ever more powerful, pc, and it could enable you to do almost anything. If you let it. I’m not going to, I thought. ‘Simple, cheap – that’s all I want’, I said. ‘Yer basic package, none of this connect-to-the-web-on-the-go malarkey, don’t need.’ I wile away enough hours following one idea to the next on the inter-net while stationary. But where does need end and extravagance begin with this exponentially exploding technology? No sooner have I taken ownership of my silver biscuit than suddenly I know lots of folk who have taken the greater leap forward to the iPhone. You know? The phone that’s not so much a phone as a repository of everything you could possibly need to know, with ‘apps’ enough to entertain the head off you? Over a 140 000 ‘apps’ to download! Apps. Yeah. Apps. What’s an ‘app’? Well, e.g.: An actor I know pulls out his iPhone, like you do. ‘Were you just looking for a straightforward mobile when you got that?’ I ask. ‘Yes,’ he confirms, ‘but look! I was about to start rehearsals for a Shakespeare, and this is what sold it to me.’ Then he scrolls down the index for The Complete Works: It’s all there, all 884 647 000 fancy words of it, in his palm. With detailed ‘search’ functions. On a device so petite he could have shoved it down his Shakespearian trews and taken it on stage with him - If he felt his lines weren’t quite there in his head, and he needed the security of them in his pants. That, my friends who mightn’t have known, is an ‘app’. Yokes that makes the iPhone not so much a phone as a second brain; that, when someone shows you theirs, persuade you to think, ‘gosh, your phone is more interesting than you are.’ And I know what such phones really want to do - They really want to be nanochip-machines functioning from inside our brains. They presage the future, when we’ll be postbiological cyborgs living in full-immersion virtual reality, controlled by machines that can process and communicate so quickly that the by-then-obsolete normal human can’t even comprehend what’s going on… Yeah, I’ve spent hours on Wikipedia half digesting the science/sci-fi of this stuff. The stuff that is happening right here, right now. And you think it’s just phones? ‘Please,’ I whisper to my new silvery mobile, ‘please just be a phone to me. I got you because I just wanted a mobile, not another head.’ It’s resting beside me, right now, as I write. When I touch it, it beeps gently, and glows at me, its face full of hidden menus. I know it just claims to be interested in the access and transfer of my essential data. But be afraid, my original head says. Be very afraid…
Anne Gildea |