The Smartphone Revolution
With smartphones, we all became inhabitants of a new digital habitat and architects of its future.
Smartphones made the digital world limitless. Suddenly, we had access to vast knowledge, endless entertainment, and global connections — all at our fingertips 24/7. These pocket-sized computers didn’t just change technology. They changed us. As the digital world unfolded before our eyes, we became enthralled inhabitants of an endlessly fascinating new habitat.
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Let’s undo the path set by smartphones. How did we get here?
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Episode 10: The Rise Of The Smartphone
The platforms we have mentioned facilitate communicational connections that are maintained in very different languages and semiotic frameworks. New formats are created, and the amount of written, auditory, audiovisual, and graphic material circulating on the Internet multiplies. Where does this material come from? Who curates the collections that circulate? The same people who consume them. The people who order objects to their homes, receive money, read texts, watch videos, or look at pictures are the same people who sell those objects, send that money, write those posts, and use their cameras to film and photograph. They are even, up to a point, the same people who assign social value to those objects with their likes and favorites and thereby determine their circulation.
Twitter users are not readers but rather tweeters. We can also identify youtubers and instagrammers who, far from holding stock in those companies or having access to executive decisions, fill the networks with content; the same content that they also consume. This dynamic of interaction defines a new social role. We cannot talk about users to define these individuals; we must talk about an interconnected community of prosumers (producer-consumers) that will be fundamental to underpinning the innovations of cloud computation.
In this sense, the invention that completed the change in our relationship to the Digital Environment by accelerating the process of appropriation were smart mobile devices, leading us into what many call Web 3.0.
Their development is eloquent in this sense: cell phones became personal computers. Thanks to the work of IBM and Blackberry, phones incorporated functionalities that fit the daily lives of executives and the daily use of digital tools. In 2006, 22 million smartphones were sold worldwide.
One year later, Apple launched the iPhone, a landmark event on the tech agenda. Jobs gave advance notice that three products would be presented: a new phone, an iPod with a touch screen, and an Internet browser. He later revealed that all three were accessed from the same device. What was innovative about the introduction of mobile devices was the concept behind the product: it is not a telephone with extra functions but rather a portable computer that can also make calls. The alliance between mobile phones and the development of Wi-Fi connections consolidated these technological advances.
The cell phone stopped being a tool with a single functionality (communication) in order to become a broad-spectrum platform whose functions are still evolving. However, popular is not the same as mainstream. While Apple was responsible for the cultural revolution of the smartphone, Android was responsible for its going mainstream. A year and a half after the first iPhone came out, Android, bought by Google, entered the market. Until the arrival of the smartphone, the television was the fastest-growing technology on the market. Currently, more than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and more than 67% of the world’s population uses a cell phone. Our role on the Internet has definitely changed since the days when we accessed it at a particular time in order to download necessary information to perform a task. Without a doubt, in a world populated by mobile devices, our relationship to technology is different.
It is no easy task to pinpoint the moment when we recognized that a change had taken place, but we can look back and trace how that process occurred with other technologies. We can think again about the analogy of motorized transportation, the technology linked to the appropriation of territory in the Industrial Age.
By the beginning of the 20th century, there were already some machines that provided several horses’ worth of power in cities: models of automobiles with complex motors that, due to their high cost, were reserved for use by only a few. We can draw a correlation between the process of these mobile devices becoming mainstream and the appearance of the Ford Model T. The car was not invented at that time, but that model was the first that made it simple (like the iPhone) and accessible (like Android devices). Basically, these innovations made cutting-edge technology personal.
Both the automobile and mobile devices gave people autonomy. With the introduction of smartphones, it was no longer about what could or could not be done on a particular website or about unique addresses but about in which direction we should orient our freedom of action. The Internet was everywhere. We no longer had to go to a computer terminal and make a connection; the connection came to us. The level of empowerment that the cell phone granted people by placing us centerstage allowed us to move out of the position of eventual consumers of the Internet to become constant inhabitants of the Digital Environment.
When mobility depended on infrastructure, as was the case in the era of the railroad or the first social networks, appropriation of the Digital Environment was still relative. The creative power that comes with the possibility of choosing where and when to access an environment gives rise to a qualitative leap. Both processes were very powerful in people’s development by giving them powers that allowed them to break certain chains associated with space-time.
With both advancements, we came ever closer to ubiquity and asynchronicity, and that has the potential to exceed the dimension of the individual. It allowed us to naturalize being in our homes, lying in our beds, but moving in digital spaces through a device. The Model T allowed humans to broaden their range of action and maximize their time. Smartphones gave us the ability to access the Digital Environment simply by wishing it, and to locate more and more of our personal and collective activities there.
We could say that more than a pocket device, the smartphone is close to being a digital extension of ourselves. As we mentioned above, it gave us the material element to transform our environment. This kind of vehicle also works as a portable amulet that concentrates the necessary power to shape the Digital Environment. This object lets us carry out very powerful collective actions. All these movements that are strengthened by technology are innate necessities that we have carried with us since we recognized ourselves as part of a whole. This technology accelerated and enhanced the process by which we systematize and recreate our social ceremonies on the network.
Every year, Oxford Languages tries to reflect the mood of English-speaking society by choosing a word that represents the experience that most affected this community during the previous twelve months. In 2013, the word chosen was “selfie.” What novelty did this concept introduce?
Directly linked to the technical specifications of mobile devices, this word synthesizes a human habit that was born with this technology: constantly documenting oneself and sharing that documentation with others in the Digital Environment. That was the period in which we began to film ourselves doing our most common daily activities: cooking, skateboarding, reacting to movies, playing with our children. Memes also arose as the popularization of a new language born of social networks.
We document reality in different formats and upload it to the network. We make everyone else our audience, and each person makes themselves the audience of other lives. Little by little, that shared space revealed itself as a public Agora in which our voices could be heard. What was being discussed on Twitter, for example, began to have the power to impose an agenda (with the appearance of trending topics), raise awareness, and mobilize actions (as in its role in the Arab Spring or the yellow vest protests in France) and political decisions. These new social activities produced new words and also new languages: the word of the year in 2015 was an emoji.
Websites changed their functionality and impact on people’s lives over the years. For example, the transformation from a single page of interactive text to a social networking platform brings with it a change in the way people began to use and move around on the Internet. The word “user” became a poor description of our online experience. This transition is due to a change in attitude. Perhaps there is a ritual power in sharing something online; perhaps thinking of it as a ceremony will allow us to understand it better.
The call to participate in a ceremony implies the ideological act of joining a group with a specific intention. Belonging to a community provides support that can symbolically exist in a physical object, as in the case of a church, but one that brings together a set of intangible values. For a ceremony to be meaningful, it must have a philosophical foundation; if not, it has no cultural functionality.
Vital ceremonies are those that have the power to transform. This includes religious ceremonies but is not limited to them. Any activity a person does in recognition of their community (peers and also their territory), every act of meeting with some degree of stability can become a ceremony and is a part of the social contract. This is how we exercise our sense of community. When thinking about ceremonies with regards to the structures in a space, it is interesting to bear in mind that they are not the interrelation of rational planning but rather of that community spirit.
In the previous section, we laid out the question of what happens when physical foundation is impossible. In this exploration of what occurred, we want to try to answer this question in terms of the emergence of communities. Why? Ceremonies (and the rituals that make them up) need that preexisting community spirit to become established. Then, by bringing people together, they connect the territory those people inhabit with society’s cosmogony. At the same time, the absence of a physical place for a given ceremony does not stop it from being carried out since there is a way in which it maintains its transcendent nature beyond matter: in the same way as in the case of language or signs (like the semiosphere), the meaning is located in the very community that carries out certain practices.
For example, the first Christians, persecuted by the Roman Empire, met in secret to officiate their ceremonies in catacombs or people’s houses. United by the collective idea of faith, they continued to share their rituals although they could not build temples. They used the word “church” to refer to the building but also, and above all, to the group of people who come together to evoke a shared feeling. Ceremonies emerge in communities as a particular cultural feature. We cannot help but establish and then recreate those ceremonies. For the same reason, during these first years of exploration of the Digital Environment, we have identified some evocative groups or initiatives.
The first years of our activity on social networks and the growth of these networks are evidence of that. The main functions of social networks, which were born as dynamics that are exclusive to the Digital Environment, are “liking” and “sharing.” These functions, summed up by two buttons that we can find on almost any network, are central and came into existence after the year 2000. Publicly announcing that we like something and having the ability to share it with others shapes our digital behavior. These actions also exceed those boundaries and permeate our natural world, becoming a part of our daily speech. As we can see, changes in ceremonies also change the way we behave.
Once we meet in a shared virtual environment, we share music and files, and as we begin to share knowledge, we also build it as a community. In the year 2001, Wikipedia appeared. This digital encyclopedia was very different from its most popular predecessor, which Microsoft sold on CD and updated every year: Encarta. From its beginnings, Wikipedia presented itself as an online platform for sharing knowledge collaboratively. Instantly, given its constant capacity for updating and its mechanisms for discussion and debate, its existence made all other encyclopedias obsolete. With its success, a logic that is exclusive to digital platforms gained visibility and power: the public debate forum.
This is a milestone of transformation: we see the emergence of new ways to create, inspired by the intangible aspects of our world. Today, we no longer think of an encyclopedia as a space in which a few people produce knowledge and others receive it. The “wiki” concept consists of the possibility to debate content as a community, update it, and constantly correct it. We can even mark the points that are subject to continued debate, that do not have a single version. Not everyone who reads writes, but there is a large community of collaborators that anyone (reader or not) can be a part of.
This example is also useful to see the social process implied by that change. Wikipedia stayed relevant as a self-managed project, maintained by collaborators themselves, united by the desire to build and share knowledge. We could not imagine Wikipedia without the collaborative logic driven by Web 2.0, and we can also consider how the mobility of Web 3.0 enhanced that knowledge and brought it into our conversations.
Assigning meaning is a desire that emerges and is put into practice by a community. In the process of appropriating the Digital Environment, people have shaped its tools and its content, finding an immaterial but meaningful framework for our ceremonies. What began as an operation of moving our social customs to the Digital Environment made way for innovation.
At the instrumental level, the definitive change occurred with the arrival of smartphones in our hands. It was then that we gained independence from stationary computer terminals and waiting to get home or to work in order to access a connected computer. We stopped being temporary visitors and became active participants, constant prosumers. Unlike in the Natural Environment, it is difficult to establish a system of coordinates. We cannot say: “This is where the Cardo crosses the Decumanus, we will build a temple.” Ceremonies in the Digital Environment are not as evident as constructing a monument. The phenomenon is ubiquitous: it is embodied in each of us and reflected in a community movement. It is also asynchronous: we can go back to events time after time and continue to act upon previous ones, creating content that future people (even future generations) will be able to access.
With the emergence of the idea that the network is what people make of it, a change in perception comes about. The human factor becomes decisive and begins to be valued as something that provides meaning and life to spheres in which humans appear and develop. Like in the case of the growth of railway networks, the Digital Wild West stopped seeming so indomitable and began to show its possibilities. What happens once we have appropriated a space? The new strategies of communication we have developed in the Digital Environment make up a new cultural system. The first years of this century saw us enter a new environment and begin to inhabit it. Perhaps somewhere in this process, we can look each other in the eye and recognize ourselves as inhabitants of the Digital Environment.
In the next episode: Explore the idea of urbanizing the Digital Environment and whether it’s possible to create order out of digital anarchy.
Digital Pilgrims is a podcast based upon the book “Digital Pilgrims. Towards a Quantum Humanity” by Adrián Sicilia.
