How my Smart Phone Dying Reminded me of Using the Internet Before the Web [Ice Cream Sundae]
I’ve had a fantastic week in Prague, it was my first time visiting and it’s a truly beautiful city. I had one morning to walk around the old town; the weather was luckily clear and sunny for a few hours. As I retreated to a coffee shop to get some work done, the sky clouded over. The European Planning Conference was a brilliant experience. You can read my blog post about it to find out more.
On the downside, my phone suddenly died in Prague. We had a break during the conference, I pulled the phone out of my pocket to check it and it turned itself off. Now if I plug it constantly cycles through trying to restart, a logo appears, and then goes dark. I’ve arrived in Vienna now and handed it off to a mobile phone repair shop. They confirmed it is a hardware problem, which is what I’d told them to start with. Apparently it’s a problem that has happened to other people, I found many reports of similar issue online.
I don’t usually think of myself as needing my phone. It was interesting to realise yesterday how automatically annoyed and powerless I was at the phone no longer working. There are no buttons I can press to try and repair it. Then I was even more annoyed at being annoyed, if that makes sense.
If I didn’t feel a need for my phone then why would I be annoyed at it not working?
It’s made me think about my reliance of my gadgets and devices, particularly mobile ones.
It’s funny considering how resistant I was about the whole mobile phone thing to begin with.
I often mention as a part of my personal geek creds that I grew up with the Minitel in France, a system acknowledged as one of the most successful ancestors to the web on a national level. The name stands for “Médium Interactif par Numérisation d’Information Téléphonique” or Interactive Medium by Digitalisation of Telephonic Information.
They started rolling out the system in 1982, France Telecom quickly started giving them out to people. It looked like an early computer, a bicoloured screen connected to the landline, providing free access to the white and yellow pages for directories. By the time I moved to France in 1985, the terminals were almost in every household. No need for a bulky phone directory, you just had to fire up the Minitel terminal and look up the address or number. Other services quickly started being available too, like being able to access the train line and look up cinema show times for example, real time chat room, and many other types of businesses.
They would advertise being available on the Minitel: 3615 was the main dedicated number for a wide variety of services, kind of like having a dot com website. Accessing services had a (prohibitive) cost per minute. I could access the various services to look up information, play games leading to being told off by my parents for spending too much money on the phone bill afterwards. When I was like 11 or 12 years old, my favourite late night radio shows had their dedicated 3615 sites, with all the single colour against a black screen branding, pixelated games, and chat rooms you could imagine.
I remember 3617 was typically for adult only type services, so yeah that was also a part of my puberty, waiting for white on black pixels to show up slowly and horizontally line by line, to finish up in with a woman in a possibly suggestive outfit, or possibly what looked like a tangram puzzle combination.
I remember we’d try and switch where we’d access the terminal with a few different friends around town, depending whose parents where least likely to be around the house and least likely to notice a bump in their phone bill due to pre-pubescent kids accessing the Minitel online services in the late eighties and early nineties.
I grew up with connected digital services and chatting to random strangers online, given it was one of my favourite activities. I thought it was cool and interesting to chat to other people online. Games adverts were always tempting and I’d try them out whenever I could but they weren’t as good as the Nintendo NES games so I wouldn’t spend much of my time or my parents phone bill on those.
As soon as the web came round I jumped on board as fast as I could and loved it. In 1995, I visited the US and remember finding out about this curious America Online thing, a computer messaging service that was all the rage with people I met of the same age. It seemed to be about the same thing as a Minitel but they could easily contact each other amongst groups of friends rather than chat with random strangers.
Back in France a year or two later, Caramail was fast becoming one of the largest and most important webmail services. It was way cooler than Hotmail, or maybe it was just French and so when I asked friends where I should have my email address Caramail was the obvious answer. The service was also famous for their many themed chatrooms.
A few years later, I was a regular in the “amateurs of poetry”, and “romantics” chat groups but that’s probably a story for another time. As I kept getting my geek on with connected services, mobile phones appeared and I decided I didn’t need them. I’m not exactly sure why.
My friends were all getting these mobile phones. I tried to play snake on one but that was about it. My brother had the smallest mobile phone possible when I visited him in New York in 2003. Meanwhile, I kept on insisting I didn’t see any point to them. I would meet people via the chat rooms, and organise it with fixed times and places as we always did, no need for a phone. The web had all I could ever want from computer technology. Having a phone with me to be available for a call didn’t sound appealing. I just didn’t feel I needed one. When I moved from Paris to London in 2004 mobile phone penetration had reached over 70% of the population and I was a minority of non- owners. I don’t think it was a firm conviction at first, but the more of my friends got mobile phones, the more I was stubbornly stating I didn’t need or want one.
After moving to London and being pulled out of my regular routine, I suddenly had the need for a phone. I hesitated but a new job, new surroundings, new friends, all of them relying on their phones made it difficult to not follow the flow. I’d held on for as long as I could and ended up admitting defeat 10 years ago. I bought myself a Nokia 6010 mobile phone, still in the top 10 lists of the most popular phones in the world apparently. It was sturdy, boasted an amazing 4.096 colour pattern on a 96 by 65 pixels definition screen. The snake game came pre-installed, it could emit and receive both short message service (SMS) and voice calls. It told the time, had a nifty stopwatch function and a handy calculator. There was also a calendar and a to do list feature, which I didn’t use much back then. Last but not least, Internet on mobile WAP 2.0 was enabled on the phone in case you had a lot of phone bill money and loading time to waste on that. Which wasn’t my case back then.
I didn’t have many phones since then, aside form dropping that Nokia in the toilet at the office one day, which was kind of embarrassing. I learned to not pull out my phone of my pocket to answer it at the same time as unzipping my jeans. I not so deftly pulled the phone out of my jeans and in a smooth motion let it jump out of my hands and in the toilet. The phone didn’t like that too much. I hadn’t done anything in that toilet just yet, in case you’re wondering. The phone didn’t like that too much and didn’t work very well afterwards, even after letting it dry for a while. The beautiful 12 bit screen didn’t display properly anymore.
Happy with my experience of the colour screen phone, I was ready to live in the future and go with a Cybershot camera Sony Ericsson phone, the K800i — I still many travel photos uploaded to Flickr taken with that camera phone.
It was the iPhone 2 after that, iPhone 4 for a short time, before going back to the K800i while travelling, Blackberry from work in Singapore, and moving on to Android with the Nexus 5 last year. So there, I’ve had 5 mobile phones in total including the iPhone 4 that I sold to a friend after only a month. I think it’s a pretty good track record; I took good care of them considering all my travels. All this good care, and this is how my Nexus 5 phone thanks me, just choking up all of a sudden. I can take it as a personal insult as much as I want, it doesn’t seem to help my phone turn on again.
As I said I’m travelling at the moment, and it’s crazy how accustomed I’ve become to using Google maps and a couple of other apps whenever needed. I feel like an addict missing something. I reach to my pocket wondering if I am missing someone’s message on Whatsapp, or just to check any new notifications, and remember my phone has gone dark. It’s taking a certain mental effort to remind myself I don’t really need it. I know almost all my data is backed on somewhere on the cloud, so at least that part hasn’t concerned me too much, it’s really the habit and convenience, particularly when travelling.
I’ve had to use a mixture of common sense, memory and a paper map to navigate my way around Vienna this afternoon. One hand it was jarring to not be able to rely on maps in my phone, on another it is interesting to notice how using an analogue map is almost the same thing. It doesn’t point me the right direction, but I guess enough with directions. I just have to think a little bit rather than outsource that part of my brain thinking power to my mobile device.
I think once I stopped getting annoyed with the absence of my phone, I worked on sound editing some interview recordings for my podcast, and then writing this.
The question I’m left with and would like to ask you is what do you do with the additional thinking space handy mobile devices provide for you?
It might be an interesting idea to give thought to on a Sunday afternoon.
See you next week, if you want to get in touch in the meantime; I guess you’ll just have to use the old fashioned email reply button instead of a phone call!
As usual, if you’ve enjoyed reading please tell a friend about the newsletter, they might enjoy reading it too.
Cheers
Willem
This newsletter was originally published via email on the 29th November 2015. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae on the Ice Cream for Everyone website.
