Triumpth and Tyranny of the Tiny Screen

‘ There are rules that determine the reaction to emerging technologies : (a)

 ‘ 1) Anything that is in your world when you are born, is normal and ordinary, and just a natural part of the way things work. (b)

‘ 2) Anything that that is invented in the first third of your life span, is new and exciting and revolutionary. (c)

‘ 3) Anything that is invented once you are middle aged, is against the natural order of things.‘

(paraphrased from 'Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Fit 026', BBC radio version, by Douglas Adams) 

 Now, the raw speed of technological change has itself been exponentially accelerating over my life time. This is so well understood, that ‘Future Shock’ (defined by Alvin Toffler in 1970) hardly exists as a concept any more.
 If anything, the concern I see looming in a current generation is almost the exact opposite. That current conditions might actually result in the decline of rapid change, create some kind of reversal back to a slower pace and reduced accumulation of individual material wealth.


 But here is the first point of this commentary :

- In 2000, roughly 15 million of population of 30 million in Canada had internet access - 50%.
- For 2019, the total is roughly 96% of all Canadians have internet access (34.5 of 38 million). (1)
- Today, 78 % of those people are using a smart phone to access the internet. (2)

But, increasingly, it has become clear that more and more (younger) adults are using tiny cell phone screens as their portal to the internet. And that tiny portal is coming to dominate their entire view of the wider world in all aspects. (3)

 Especially over the last (2019) year, I increasingly receive, if not the majority, of e-mails about the training programs I offer, that look like this :

 ‘ what courses do u offer and what r dates ‘ 

sent from my iPhone 

 Now, if you only used your phone for the internet, what you would get is the intentionally, greatly reduced, for tiny phone screens, short, overview. Which would look like this (4) :

 First View - ‘Training’

Scrolling down - ‘Go on for Details’ section

Hard to read? Turn the screen sideways. 

 Eventually, if you keep scrolling even further down, you will get to a hot link that allows you to send an e-mail to me. This ‘mobile’ version is purposefully mainly composed of images - each image has another hot link available to a specific course description on the main (larger format) web site.
 See all the hot links at the bottom? Same thing (goes to details on that course on the main site). You have to pass a total of SEVENTEEN hot links to the main site, all of which would provide detailed information, to get to the spot where you see my e-mail address - when your portal is a phone.


 Here is the analysis - the second point :

 I’m going to suggest, at this point in time (2020), calling that thing many of you are carrying around a ‘phone’ is disingenuous. (5)

 Remember these? It was half the size of a loaf of bread in 1966.
Ok, your Apple iPhone 11 (current model) does not provide remote scanning for life forms, or more than limited scientific sample analysis. It does however fit in your pocket.
 It does do the following that the Original Series Tricorder did :
- GPS
- three-axis gyro
- Accelerometer
- Proximity sensor
- ambient light sensor
- barometer
- view video (via a 5.8 inch screen, the tricorder has about a 2 1/2 inch)
- audio (no stereo or headphone jack on the tricorder)
- remote connection (although the tricorder was limited to computer interface)

 What your phone has that the tricorder did not :
- touch activated screen
- WiFi (no internet in the 1960’s!)
- Bluetooth system (large number of possible connected devices)
- Siri AI assistant - still camera (12 mpx)
- video camera (HD @ 60 fps, stereo sound)
- camera / video lighting
- water resistance (to 4 m)
- video calling
- And then there are all those applications. Which can add thousands of individual functions that the tricorder never dreamed of.

oh - yea, you also have a mobile phone.

 Ok - wonderful. All that power in your pocket (for a mere $1000 US).
What are you actually using it for?
 - Endless, almost constant (basically meaningless) ’small talk’
- Text Messaging
- more of the same drivel.
- Snap chat - see above via another pipeline
- Instagram, taking endless photographs of yourself doing … well, pretty much the visual form of the same mindless activities. (Your lunch. You getting on the bus…) - - playing games

Yes - you can cruise the internet!
Attempting to view information, presented for viewing on a full sized (typically a 15 inch or more) screen. Next time you use a computer, lay your phone up against the monitor. See the problem?

A generation where the ‘Medium is the Message’.
And the Message is reduced to 140 characters. Someone else’s heavily modified image, taken completely without any context.

A 3 x 5 inch window into a full sized 360 degree world.


 1)
Find more statistics at Statista

 2) Importantly to this commentary : Among adult users, 88 % are also using desk / lap top portals. (honestly, I suspect this reflects ‘work’ vs ‘home’ use). The main Wareham Forge web site pages also have an ‘e-mail me’ hot link. Again well below all the details are provided. But I’ve built in a way to tell which comes just from phones.
 3) I have commented about this before : ‘About a Phone’ - December 28, 2018
 4) Set up to use an iPhone screen - shown life sized. Those screen shots captured using the Mobile Phone Emulator by Cowemo
 5) There is definite irony here. If you are actually reading this, I am almost certain you will be using a full sized screen, at the least a 13 - 15 inch lap top. As a blog posting, I suspect this commentary would be almost impossible to read on a tiny phone screen. The fact that this is appearing via a ‘blog’ itself, represents what is certainly moving to a ‘dated’ communications method. As a system, blogs started roughly 2000 (This blog dates to 2006).
Statistics in 2019 (from the USA, unfortunately):
- there are 31 million active blogs (at least one post per month)
- 70% of blog owners give $$ as the reason they actively blog
- The current ‘ideal’ length for a blog is given as 2500 words, with a reading time of 7 minutes. (This commentary comes in at roughly 1500 words btw)
- Significantly, this attention span is seen as sharply dropping, year by year.
Source : https://firstsiteguide.com/blogging-stats/ 
Note that the balance there leans to economic performance data
  
Images mostly stolen outright from internet sources - without any author citations. 

Some images are selected to reflect my own Life Frame :
 a) 1955, the year I was born. The DUCE ‘commercial’ computer, used for science and engineering, of which a total of 30 were built. It had 1.5 KILO-byte RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_DEUCE (Note that Sputnik 1 was launched on Oct 4 that year, I was born one month later, on November 3.)
 b) 1960, The Nixon / Kennedy Debate, on black and white television. As a young kid, my family had a floor console tv from about that date, about the size of a contemporary dish washer. Colour tv was not introduced into Canada until 1966. My parents divorced in 1967, and the family fell on hard economic times for the rest of the years after. We actually only would have tv at home on and off - as individual vacuum tubes failed in what was increasingly an ‘antique’, it often was my paper route earnings that purchased replacements. (One of my earliest ‘events’ memories is the death of John F. Kennedy - but not the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
 c) Apple Macintosh - 1985, 512 KILO-byte RAM, the first ‘all in one’ home computer with the graphic interface now standard for all computers. My first computer, purchased second hand, about 1988. This had an external 20 MB hard drive. (I still have this working machine, with all the original software - on 3.5 floppy disks.)

I currently own :
- Desk Top - Mac Mini / 8 GB RAM / 120 GB drive / 2014 (to OS 10.10.5) Lap Top
- MacBook Pro 3.1 - 15” / 2 GB RAM / 120 GB / 2007 (OS 10.6.8) purchased second hand. Tablet
- iPad Mini / 1 GB RAM / 16 GB drive / 2013 (iOS 9.3.5)
- Cell Phone - Alcatel 460T / 0.5 GB RAM / 2 GB drive / 2016 (Android 4.4.2) This my first ’smart’ phone, although I have the internet data features turned OFF. (BTW : My cell phone is almost always OFF - unless I am traveling.)