While reading this week, I got stuck on Shirky's repeated examples of technological advances. It got me thinking to back when "smart phones" first came on the market. I cannot tell you how excited I was to get my iPhone two years ago (yes, I'm a late adopter, what can I say -- aside from sorry for throwing in Communication theories on a blog for an English class...). I sat in the parking lot and began texting my friends that I had just purchased my first "smart phone" after years of telling everyone I needed to make phone calls and send quick text messages. I didn't need the internet or the youtube app or any of that other fancy stuff. When I showed my fiancee my new iPhone, I thought he was going to be so impressed with all the cool stuff this new gadget could do (I bought the second version of the iPhone right when it came out). However, as I was showing him my cool new phone, he pulled out his phone from his study abroad in Japan. Let me tell you, they have the coolest gadgets over in Japan! I thought we were a gadget-obsessed country, but we cannot hold a candle to the Japanese when it comes to cool (and useful) gadgets!
In Japan, apparently basic cell phones have the capability of doing all of the things our "new" cell phones can do as well as act as portable televisions. Can you imagine?!?! A TV you can carry around with you in your pocket for that early commute to work or school. And these phones have been out for years. It makes me wonder what "new" technologies we have that would be considered yesterday's news, and what we think will be tomorrow's technology that they already have today.
In the Epilogue, Shirky is discussing how everyone was discussing how nuclear power and space flight were going to be the next big thing in technological advances (299-300). I'm now wondering if those in Japan knew it was going to be birth control and transistors (300). Did such a tech-savvy and tech-advanced country see the rise of social media? Could we possibly learn from this tech-savvy country and grow our technological advances at a faster rate to equate to theirs?
Tee hee, late adopter. I got my first cell phone in 2007. On the other hand, I was the first of my friends to get DSL. That, however, was luck. Have I mentioned that I used to live in a rural mountainous area with nonexistent cell phone service? Or that many of my friends there STILL can't have DSL? It's now no longer necessary to stand in the middle of a two-lane highway to get cell reception (yes, I have witnessed someone doing that) and the friends who can afford it have air cards, but a lot of what we take for granted in Clemson isn't widely available in less densely populated parts of the US.
ReplyDeleteJapan, however, seems to have solved this problem. Most of the articles I found about cell phones in Japan were a couple of years old and most alluded to "keitai culture" or cell phone culture. I suspect there are no recent articles because keitai is fully integrated into Japanese culture and is no longer worthy of commentary. Forget watching television - Japanese people can use their cell phones to pay for purchases by swiping their phones past a scanner. And the US just started experimenting with smart phone boarding passes in certain airports.
I think it's all pretty cool, but I'm not sure if we're looking at a technological godsend or an intermediate step to something so much better. I guess you can ask me in 10 years.
Okay I thought I was the last person on this earth to get a phone my senior year in high school, but that was in 2003 -- still four years before you, Jen! And I have yet to get a smart phone. Nope, I still use the old tried and true dial-and-text device. The idea of paying all of that extra to be online just scares me. It would almost double my bill. But anyway, now I'm getting off an a tangent.
ReplyDeleteThe cool technological advances of Japan's phones, such as being able to watch TV wherever you go, just proves how society has really begun to depend upon being connected to the world. If Google is not accessible to us 24/7, how will we know which french fry is less fat or which store has the cheaper jeans? What's interesting, though, is that even though these advances make us feel more connected to the world by being able to check the news or the football game anytime we want, it also makes us more disconnected. I'm not going to personally ask someone for a recipe if I can just go to epicurious.com even quicker. So these advances, though they allow me to talk to someone in Australia while reading an article written in China, make me less likely to talk to the guy who lives next door. It's a kind of disconnected connection, if that makes any sense at all.
There's a really cool book about cell phones in Japan by Howard Rheingold called _Smart Mobs_. It's facinating how differently that culture uses the phones than ours.
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