Influence of iPhone is everywhere
Ten years ago, we wrote about a new high-tech device that transfixed us even before it reached the market: the iPhone.
Skeptics in our ranks predicted that the iPhone would flop because it wasn’t really necessary. They already had flip cellphones for calls, BlackBerrys for emails, digital or film cameras for snapping photos, Garmins or MapQuest printouts for street navigation, and iPods for music. Why, they reasoned smugly, did they need an iPhone?
A billion phones and all those selfies and texts and adorable guinea-pig videos later, we all know why.
No one then could fathom or predict how profoundly the iPhone and its competitors would shape everyday life — and demolish industries.
What’s even more fascinating than celebrating the 10th anniversary of the iPhone’s release on June 29, 2007? Anticipating its eventual demise and the tech marvels that will take its place.
Wall Street Journal writer Christopher Mims predicts that by the iPhone’s 20th anniversary, the phone will have morphed into something else. It could be thin and foldable. Or completely irrelevant. All those apps and services that make it a vital umbilical link to the world may have migrated to other devices or venues.
The purpose of our brains is to retain important information and forget everything else, including awkward encounters with various people throughout the day. A future in which every move you make is tracked, every experience annotated, is a future that never leaves you alone with your thoughts.
Remember the 2000 nonfiction book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by Harvard University professor Robert Putnam? His points then: People don’t make connections like they used to. They don’t get to know their neighbors, don’t join social clubs or professional organizations, neglect to vote, skip church.
Putnam’s likely culprit: television, “which seems to emit a sort of irresistible tractor beam dragging people into chairs and pinning them there, hour after hour, night after night,” then-Tribune critic Julia Keller wrote in a book review.
Flash forward to the age of iPhone, in which information overload from Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and a gazillion other sources means that there’s always someone in a chat room or on a website a click or two away. Comforting? Not for those who crave solitude from time to time.
And these devices could wriggle even more intrusively into human reality in the next decade. “With our every action mapped to every outdoor and indoor space we inhabit — combined with the predictive power of artificial intelligence and distributed across a suite of devices for which Siri has become the default interface — the result could be a life directed by our gadgets,” Mims writes.
If you’re on a diet, your refrigerator could chide you every time you reach for the Moose Tracks ice cream. Your iScold, with its annoying psychological expertise, could patiently explain how you just mishandled that conversation with your daughter’s teacher.
Maybe that is our future, and we’ll have the iPhone to blame or thank. We’ll see. Until then, though, we remain in charge of our phones. We can use them 24/7, or if we dare, turn them off.