Knowing your app from your elbow

SMART PHONE ETIQUETTE:Smart phones have changed the way we behave in public. Here, DAVIN O'DWYERlays down a few rules

ARTHUR C CLARKE’s third law – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – is often trotted out as a pithy commentary on the transformative capabilities of technological change (while also making a point about the rudimentary nature of human credulity), but it ignores the fact that most inventions’ earliest incarnations tend to be error-prone and frustrating rather than revolutionary and magical.

There is one prominent exception to that rule. It has been fully three years since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, and even now, with a fourth generation soon to be revealed (and a larger sibling, the iPad, stealing all the headlines), the iPhone still has the capacity to induce that “indistinguishable from magic” feeling in its users. As the influential US tech blogger John Gruber put it a few years ago: “If I could travel back 20 years and show my then 15-year-old self just one thing from the future of today, it would be the iPhone. It is our flying cars.”

But with any revolution comes a new set of behavioural patterns, and the inevitable lag in adjusting to them is producing some notable social issues. Here are just a few of them.

No more debates, no unanswered questions

An unexpected victim of the iPhone is the humble table quiz, which has now been largely reduced to a kind of clandestine Googling competition. On the upside, dodgy arguments are much easier to debunk now we have the power of the internet in our hands. More importantly, a chief benefit of having an encyclopedia in your pocket at all times is that we can now easily distinguish between the genuinely intelligent and those people with a freakish memory for trivia, who used to be mistaken for genuinely intelligent.

Now that we’re all in the freakish trivia remembering camp, for all intents and purposes, the really smart folk have a chance to shine. This will probably be a matter of serious academic interest in coming generations – if we don’t have to expend so much precious energy storing facts, will our brains function differently? Which is the sort of question table quizzes might have to start asking soon if they are to retain any credibility.

The App comparison ritual

Glancing through other people’s app collections has become a staple activity among iPhone and iPod Touch owners, but its social significance is yet to be firmly established. Depending on the nature of the interaction and the genders involved, this can be either an early stage in the 21st-century mating ritual, like a peacock fanning its tail; or an almost aggressive statement of digital superiority. Sometimes, of course, it’s just two people trying to find cool new apps.

The end of idleness and boredom

This is possibly the biggest behavioural implication of the iPhone and its ilk: battery life permitting, you will never again find yourself with nothing to do. That unexpected wait at the bus stop becomes an opportunity to catch up with your RSS feeds. That bus ride allows you to play Tap Tap Revenge. Waiting in line for your lunch affords you the opportunity to tweet about waiting in line for your lunch. Time will never again be wasted (or more accurately, time will get wasted in a much more diverting fashion).

Mobile insularity

With endless entertainment offered by the device in your pocket, random interactions with other humans become degraded and compromised. Never mind casual chit-chat with people – eye contact with strangers will go way down. Which is fine for the shy or introverted type, but problematic when it’s half of society, all of the time. Still, we’ve got Facebook at the touch of a button so we can easily compensate for any loss of human interaction.

Phone accessory addiction

It happens every time – you get this precisely engineered landmark of minimalist design in your hands, admire it for all of three minutes, and then you go and shell out €15 for a rubberised case that makes it look like a Fisher Price toy. This is the smartphone equivalent of putting scaffolding over a Mies Van der Rohe building, using the logic that because it’s such an incredibly well-designed and important structure, it can’t be exposed to the elements. Thankfully, I don’t own any Mies Van der Rohe buildings because if I did, I’d also have a bewildering array of scaffolding to choose from every day.

Compromised privacy

If you trembled at the thought of Facebook’s privacy implications, you’ll need to sit down before considering the full impact of the coming generation of location-aware apps. Apps such as Foursquare and Google Buzz will proudly broadcast your location to all and sundry, with inevitably problematic results. Having your privacy violated is one thing but having your location revealed at the same time is positively Orwellian. This has yet to become a serious issue but it is only a matter of time.

White earbud fatigue

A lot of people like to display their audiophile credentials by whingeing about the trademark white earbuds. Granted, the earbuds that come with the iPhone are pretty mediocre, but I don’t recall people expending as much energy complaining about the earphones shipped with the Sony Walkman, and they were usually worse. But hey, if you prefer a big set of Bang and Olufsen cans on your head that are larger than the iPhone itself, knock yourself out.

Instant escapism

We all have plenty of moments where we’re stuck in tedious conversations or humdrum meetings, and the thought will flicker across your mind: “There is a better place for me, a more interesting place, an iPhonic place.”

Resist the temptation to go to that place – at all costs – because to give in to that temptation is not only breathtakingly rude, it is also the first symptom of a loss of human empathy that prefigures the rise of the machines. Or so the fiction of Isaac Asimov might have you believe. Either way, don’t do it.