This September commences a variety of new Smartphones.
The iPhone 6 came out a week ago, with larger Sapphire crystal screens, faster
A8 chip and a slimmer look. Similarly, Samsung, the Korean tech giant, rivaled
Apple by releasing Galaxy Alpha and Note. No doubt soon many of these mobile
devices will go to the hands of many readers, and join our campus and
classrooms. However, besides the security crises of
Cloud service that sparked recently, you also need to consider other important
aspects about using a Smartphone.
Some may regard Smartphone as merely a convenient
device for communication. But in retrospect, the Smartphones business and
social apps, have casted revolutionary impacts to the human society. Last century, a talented Archaeologist V. Gordon
Childe notified in his book “Man made
himself” that human beings “progress” by changing economy patterns. The transformation of subsistence, such as from hunter-gathering
to farming, is revolutionary to human history because it can influence the way
people forming society. From this perspective, we may consider the use
of Smartphone as a new revolution, which reshapes our ways of subsistence,
social networking, and self-identity.
The
Smartphone Economy: No More Jobs
The use of farming technology, as noted by Childe, transformed the human subsistence and
economic structure. From the last decade, Smartphone becomes the most dominant
consumer product in global economy, regarding its high popularity, profit, and
replacement cycle.
According to research by Gartner, worldwide Smartphone sales to end users have reached 968
million units by 2013. That is, about 13.74 percent of the world’s population
shopping for a Smartphone. Moreover, Smartphone earns a high gross margin. Information
company IHS Teardown reports that a Galaxy S4 LTE version
costs $241 to build while the sale price is more than $700.
Furthermore, according to a study by Recon Analytics, the handset replacement
cycle is less than 2 years in the States, making the Smartphone the most
influential business in today’s world economy.
And as Smartphones become embedded with functions
such as a camera, radio and a game console, many jobs that once create devices
with functions that Smartphones now have are being affected.
There is no right or wrong about evolution, but the
problem for Smartphone business is, those who lost their jobs could not replace
for a new one. As the Smartphone business creates profits, the industry did not
reciprocate for more jobs in America. For instance, companies such as General
Electric provided 400,000 work opportunities, and Kodak offered more than
140,000, according to The New York Times. In contrast, Apple employs only 43,000 people in the
United States in 2012. A more
striking example occurred when Instagram was sold for a billion to Facebook in
2012, there were only 13 employees.
Jobs that could be stay in our nation are flow
oversea to lower down cost of production. Apple’s contract assembler Foxconn hires
more than one million factory workers in China to produce most of world’s
iPhones and iPads. The Wall Street
Journal has noted in 2012 that at Foxconn’s plant, Chinese employees
usually take a 12-hour shift and work six days a week, while earning less than
$17 per day—which is not possible under American labor laws.
President Obama, at a dinner in Silicon Valley,
asked Steven Jobs if iPhone could be made in the States, and he answered
clearly “those jobs aren’t coming back.” After Jobs passed away, I often read a
quote on Facebook saying, “10 years ago, we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope, and
Johnny Cash. Now we have no jobs, no hope, and no cash.”
Steven Jobs, rather than giving you a job,
contributed more to America’s unemployment rate.
The
Smartphone Communication: So Close and Yet Far Away
After adopting farming, Childe argues that
human beings built social networks as the next revolutionary step. Farmers
gradually lived together, composing kin-based groups, and forming a society in
which people are closely connected. The use of Smartphones
has also transformed social network, but in a
paradoxical way, which people seem to be closely connected by Smartphone
but in fact not.
By using Smartphone, people can share their
information on apps like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and twitter. However,
scholars have noticed many side effects of “sharing” too much.
Last year, Forbes
reported a study saying that Facebook users frequently felt jealous as their
“friends” posted excelling photos. Such negative feelings result in a “spiral
of envy” as users taking posts for self-promotion.
Also, social apps may downplay your networking
instead of facilitating it. A post on wall or a tweet does not promise
communication. We usually suppose all the friends will read our posts, but, in
real situation, most of your Facebook friends did not see it at all.
Moreover, a “like,” click it does not mean they
really like it. “It may create an illusion as if you are communicating with one
another” noted by a doctoral student at the School of Communication, “but you
could be making yourself more alone as software and algorithms increasingly
control what you’re doing on social media.”
Although Smartphone enables people to stay
connected, it can also in turn broaden their distance to reality. Recently, a
friend who is an academic philosopher and teacher said, “People are just
putting fun images of themselves. If someone looks at these images, and judges
them as 'fun and outgoing', are well really communicating with each other? It
seems like these images are doing all the talking between us.” We are not in touch with real people, and the images
take away from real dialogues. Thus, viewing such images can make a person feel
isolated.
Furthermore, I doubt if the posts on social apps can
represent one’s personality in real life. Do we update what we want others to
see, or do we update what others want to see? I am afraid many of us often do
the latter unconsciously. We prefer to post those fun photos that can
participate in the spiral of envy, as if creating illusions about our lives,
or, what’s more, a personality that only exists in cyber space. In the end,
people can only express their cyber identities by images or tweets under
140-character limit, instead of making in-depth statements for a complicated
human being who is holding the Smartphone.
Does
Smartphone Make Our Life Better?
Smartphone is a revolutionary invention to human economy
and social network, but I am worried the negative impacts it casts to job
market and social-network. I witnessed how Smartphone and all the other things
become important parts of our campus and classrooms, but many of our students
use Smartphone without knowing the tremendous impacts of it. My friends teaching at the School of Communication
used to complaint, “I was demonstrating the mechanism of how a Smartphone works,
but my students did not listen and just checking their Facebook.” As a college
student, prepare a Smartphone for classroom may not be a must, but it is
necessary to understand the serious game of phones that reshapes your subsistence
and social life.
P.S. An edited version of this article is published on UH's campus-wide newspaper, Ka Leo, Issue. 15 Volume. 109, September 15,
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