What our phones are doing to us
Written by Jason Moriber
Smithsonian Cultural Anthropologist Joshua Bell discusses the real and the ephemeral ways mobile is making an impact on people, places and things.
It hit me when Joshua Bell, the Smithsonian Museum’s Curator of Globalization, walked me through a large, heavy wooden door at the end of a long and somewhat shadowy hallway lined with ceiling-high file cabinets. It was a pang of a childhood memory, a feeling of wonderful surprise. As I exited the door, I was looking down on the elephant in the foyer of the grand entranceway of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Numerous people stood around it, taking pictures if its monumental scale, taking selfies. I was giddy that I now knew where this unspecific door led, a door that I had walked by numerous times during visits to the museum. I turned to look behind me…a creaky hallway with academic offices and cabinets filled with artifacts. All of the hallways behind these nondescript doors at the Smithsonian were lined with cabinets filled with artifacts. The museum is a collection, truly.
Joshua Bell is a cultural anthropologist, a person trained and paid to deeply understand the world around us in order to re-present the world back to us in ways we can insightfully grasp and ideally can then take action. As the Curator of Globalization, his task is not modest, though his manner and demeanor is. He invited me to speak with him from his office at the Smithsonian. His office has the academic feel of a college classroom with walls that are lined with books on industrial grey metal shelves. A professorially busy desk resides in one corner on the left, a set of chairs and a coffee table in the opposite corner closer to the books on the right. I am immediately drawn to the books. Anthropology, art history, sociology, economics, I blurt out, “What a great office!” Joshua’s office is a ‘real’ office, meaning, it’s not a workstation…it’s a place of ones own to do the important work of their life.
I turn and sit with him at the two chairs near the books. “This is my social area,” he says smiling, rocking gently in his chair, “I’m fortunate to have this office.”
“Its an inspirational space,” I reply, gazing across from where we’re sitting at shelves of posters and more artifacts.
I learned about Joshua serendipitously as he is working on an exhibition about the global impact of the mobile phone. After searching online with a handful of keywords including “the future of mobile,” there he was. We were chatting for about ten minutes, discussing the parameters of what I was seeking, and Joshua started to roll out one insight after another, so I quickly turned on my recorder to capture our conversation…
Jason: We were just speaking about your vision for the future of mobile…
Joshua: As a cultural anthropologist I’m really interested in how people interact with objects and use it to situate themselves in space in time, construct identities, solve mysteries, and interact with the wider world. It may be a roundabout way of answering your question of, “what is the future of mobile,” but for me, one of the questions of mobile for me, and my colleagues Joel Kuipers and Alex Dent at George Washington University that I have been collaborating with for about 4 years, ethnographically, is about what cell phones are doing to us as humans? As people who move through time and space, how does this technology impact our sense of self? Our sense of others? Our sense of culture if you will? Physically, health, et cetera.
One of the key things about “the future of mobile” is that there are two narratives. One narrative is very dystopian, society is breaking down…we’re becoming more individualistic. We’re alone in a crowd and our phones are turning us in on ourselves. The flip side is that the phone is liberating us and is allowing for new political, social formations. I think I fall on… depends on the latest news… but I think I fall on the middle of this spectrum of ideas. And I do, because for me, when technology initially comes out it becomes a straightjacket in a sense. It conditions us to be a certain way through its design and capabilities. Cultural anthropology teaches us that though it does impact us, our culture is also our viewpoint, a system of beliefs and dispositions; actually affect how we use these things. There is no universal reaction to mobile phones. That opens up to really interesting questions about the extent of cultural impact and what could it do into the future.
When I think about the future of mobile phones, I think about how the future is going to be a diverse one. And within a certain set of parameters, allow us to call each other from anywhere. But as smartphones, it condenses a whole range of activities that used to be dispersed throughout our technological realm. So it’s a powerful device, and what we found with our preliminary work with teenagers in Washington DC, is that it is an intensely personal one. So people view these things as highly important and essential to them.
…it’s becoming harder and harder to remember what it was like without a phone.
Now the question we are still wrestling with is whether it’s the device itself or what the device does. And I have a feeling it’s what the device does and the kind of world of big data that these cell phones connect us to. I say this as the device, though a singular object, for many people is something that they are constantly upgrading such that individual phones don’t matter as much as having access to what the phone can do. One of the things that we are testing and working through is to what extent people see cell phones as a kind of prosthesis. An extra part of us. And more and more I think they are. Personally, I can forget my wallet, but if I forget my phone, then I go back to get it. And for me, it’s becoming harder and harder to remember what it was like without a phone. How I coordinated things, or recording micro-interactions, or coordinating with my wife about our children, all examples within a wider set.
The future of the phone itself
The future of the phone has to do with scale and speed. What we will find is that these things will be faster and have greater capacity. Just the other day I saw Sony is creating a contact lenses that can record things. These will make Google Glasses look like a model T to our current cars. A large clunky thing we will laugh about. I think mobile devices are going to be wearable and this is where my interest in science fiction comes out, but I think it is more than likely that they could very well be implantable. In this sense they will literally become a part of you. That will be a fuller realization of what Donna Haraway talks about in terms of us being cyborgs. She would argue that we already are cyborgs, in terms of our computers, and other devices. So I think the cell phone will become smaller and faster and implantable. The question is so if that is the case, what will it do to us? And this is where the thought experiment and speculation arises and if you look towards current trends and issues, there are some interesting possibilities and speculations.
We already live within in a data rich world through our phones and Internet. So if the Internet of Things is realizing we will become part of that in much more serious ways. That will raise questions of whether or not the government will use these for good or evil, and that I’m not sure of. Culturally, I think that’s where interesting things will happen. Where I work in Papua New Guinea, the Purari Delta, the people there have a much more fluid sense of personhood. They have this perspective of humans being cyborgs. And by that I mean that you’re made of very different substances that are literally and metaphorically coming from other people. In the anthropological literature, emerging from the work of Marilyn Strathern, we refer to this as partible personhood or someone being a “dividual.” What this means is that people see themselves as being part of other people and that other people are a part of them. This partibility comes through gift-giving and other ritual interactions and cultural understandings of procreation. This view tends to be, but not exclusively, in societies in Melanesian communities (New Guinea, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu) where people see each other often. But now, these people move around, they live in cities, they live internationally — these cultural perspectives of personhood are still there but they are now intermixed with our Western notions of individuality.
So in for the people from the Purari Delta, and Papua New Guinea more widely, with this worldview — these devices become portals that open us up in interesting ways. They become another way in which one’s person can be affected, such as having one’s voice stolen. In many senses, what we in the West are experiencing with these devices in terms of our anxieties, about data breaches — our anxieties about identity theft whether through Facebook or Instant Messenger, or our online banking. That sort of worries of others impacting us through our devices is similar to Papua New Guineans who have always thought deeply about their social relationships. That is this worry of external forces affecting you, is something people deal with often, particularly as manifested in worries of sorcery. So for example when becoming ill, people will wonder — why am I sick? Is it because I didn’t do this transaction or exchange correctly and upset my kin or ancestors? The state of one’s social relations are the lens through which illness and misfortune are interpreted. It’s what being partible entails. Now obviously this is an analogy, but I think it is important to consider this more open view of personhood when thinking about mobile phones.
There is a parallel here with our increased worries of our security breaches, and of our reputations. Which suggests that there is a merging of ourselves with our data. To some extent, Americans are their credit scores, or at least this is how companies and financial institutions quantify us. There’s this merging of financial big data and the individual. The same issue comes up in terms of our social media selves, and the ways our images circulate now through our own doing and that of others. Just think of all the concern about our children’s and our own social media history. The concern about this being that youthful indiscretions will come back to haunt us when we apply for jobs or run for political office. These images are part of us, and their circulation has very definite impacts.
So cell phones, if implantable, will raise questions of “do you want your whole life recorded? Do you want to be always connected?” I think some amazing things can happen through that connection, but then also bad things. So if we think of contemporary narratives of how we are disconnected, these are balanced out by the fact that people are talking around the world in new ways through these devices. Our sense of community is differentiated, it’s expanded. I don’t buy the argument that the Internet is shallow or that social media breeds a lack of depth.
(As Joshua continued, I kept thinking on his point about the people of Papua New Guinea and their concept of self, of always being part of each other, that ‘myself’ is really made up of so much more of my environment, and my community, than I might realize.)
Teenagers here in the US are very connected through Snapchat, which is an interesting ephemeral means of communication. This harkens back to how you and I grew up with the phone call, which wasn’t recorded, or through direct face-to-face communication. The similarities between these different forms of communication are their temporal nature. It’s interesting how Snapchat echoes an earlier form of communication but with a spin being mostly through still or moving images. Now we know that Snapchat does record things, so the ephemerality is somewhat misleading, but at least there is the illusion of that. In the future, I think there will be lots of trends that will emerge where that ephemerality will be key. People will probably work against having these devices implanted in them and there may be a huge segment of the population who will reject these devices. But this said, now it’s becoming more and more that you need a smart phone in the working world. So the question for the future is “what levels of access will people have? What inequalities? What new demands? If we have our devices on us all the time, will employers use them to track our health and productivity levels?” I’d like to think that we won’t go towards an Orwell’s vision of Big Brother from 1984. But I do wonder what will happen.
The flip side is that maybe through interconnectedness, there will be peace, and people will solve problems faster. I’m not sure. While there will be a lot of challenges, I don’t think mobile technology will culturally flatten or homogenize us. Mobile technology will allow people to continue with their diversity, and allow us to continue to create new forms of identity. I think a lot about this last issue for our project on teenagers in Washington, DC and the exhibit we hope to do here at the National Museum of Natural History…that while smart phone technology is pretty much the same around the world people treat and understand their devices differently. They bejewel them like in South Korea or Japan, and they personalize them in different ways through cases in the US or Africa. So I think there are interesting contemporary examples of certain identities or cultural trends being exemplified and amplified by mobile phones. In the future, I see this continuing to happen. Mobile technology, and the phone, will continue to be another domain through which cultural values, aesthetics and worldviews will be worked through. It will be really interesting to see what happens.
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A version of this article featuring the full conversation between Josh and Jason was originally published at www.verizon.com on September 26, 2016.
