How Much Do You Love Your Smartphone?

The smartphone has infiltrated our lives to become an essential part of who we are and what we do. It is already impossible to imagine life without its comforts and convenience.

It’s a smart world

Research confirms we keep our smartphones close during the day and even closer when we sleep at night. We check them for information and affirmation countless times each day, as companies adopt a ‘mobile first’ policy to accommodate people’s appetite for getting the services they seek.

We use smartphones to order goods, book events and communicate in different ways with family and friends. And we use them to occupy ourselves by playing games, reading the news, getting sports results or following the ups and downs of celebrity life.

Smartphones have absorbed many other products and negate the need for phone books, address books, cameras, maps, flight boarding cards and even money. They have changed habits in such a short space of time that it’s difficult to predict how much we will be dependent on them in the future.

Such change has been replicated in countries around the world as billions of people embrace the smartphone for its connectivity and convenience. Habits that lasted decades such as getting a taxi or meeting someone new have been transformed as the smartphone offers easy and effective alternatives.

Whether or not such widespread disruption is good or bad is irrelevant as we learn to accept the awesome power of the technology we carry in our pocket.

It’s a new world

We have entered a new era through the use of the smartphone as we offer personal details for free to companies that generate profits at unprecented levels. And with such profit comes investment in the next iteration of technology infused devices that will cause us to remember the smartphone with nostalgia.

The speed of change indicates we are at a crucial point where change is happening at a greater speed than our ability to keep up with it. It is accepted that our ability to absorb technology will continue in a linear fashion as technology changes geometrically.

There is also a growing concern that the use of specifically tailored apps is rewiring the plasticity of the human brain to the extent that it is shaping the digital generation in ever more narrower ways of thinking. This will no doubt trigger a backlash to the omnipresence of the smartphone and its maker’s influence on how we live but it may not happen soon given their ability to embed their influence.

So, the smartphone is reshaping the world and our role in it as we experience the very early stages of a digitally disruptive era.