....on when growing up with smartphones is a given
WE HAD AN old saying in my house when I was growing up that went a little something like this: “If you don’t get off that bloody phone I’ll redden your arse for you.” It wasn’t the catchiest of phrases, but it got straight to the point.
I’d give my right arm to listen back on some of those teenage phone calls. What could we possibly have had to say to each other for so long, just hours after parting company at the school gates? Maybe it’s best consigned to the history vaults.
Then, of course, there was the first boyfriend, a long-distance affair between Dublin and Meath. The phone bills soared, the rows escalated, and drastic measures were taken: a pay phone. In the house. For shame.
As with any addict going cold turkey, the DTs followed the tantrums, and the shameless grovelling followed the DTs, until an irresistible – surely divine – opportunity presented itself. The key. I found the key. Urban Cookie Collective may as well have been singing to my soul.
It’s amazing how far 20p can go when you’re using the same one again and again. I was back in business, smug as a bug and brimming with self-entitlement.
Of course, I hadn’t licked it up off a rock, this obsession with the phone, and there were as many pots in the family as there were kettles. Take a large brood, spread them around the world and introduce them to the telephone late enough in proceedings, when the technology has been perfected (I remember my grandparents getting theirs installed). The result: immediate addiction. And why not? All of a sudden, two people oceans apart could be in each other’s ear, costing next to nothing, relatively speaking. This wasn’t the telegram: there was no need to be urgent, any old yak would do.
These early adopters we hear so much about are not the real drivers of technological integration: it’s the people who see beyond the functionality to the frivolous enjoyment who turn nations into techno-junkies. Unz unz.
Take my dad. I have a vivid memory of him bringing home his first mobile phone. I must have been around 12; young enough to express interest rather than disdain. It was an almighty brick of a thing. A massive black battery with a cradle on top to hold the handset and act as a handle for hulking its great weight around. It was an 088, of course, and we knocked great craic out of using the speaker phone (wow!) to make prank phone calls to something called “directory enquiries”.
The best part of 20 years later, and my dad’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter is sitting opposite me, the smartphone prised from my hands, delicately tapping and pinching the screen with dexterity. It’s incredible and mildly disturbing to watch. “I want to see Moe and Obi!” The dogs.
Whereas my dad needed the mobile phone for long days at the wheel, Paula B, this dexterous toddler, is greedy for the technology, perfected to within an inch of its lithium-ion battery life, for no other reason than that a grown-up has one. Monkey see, monkey do (another big catchphrase in our house). Smartphones are a given for her: she’s unlikely to ever question whether or not she will own one, it’s just a matter of when.
So what happens when you go from nought to smartphone without having, at the very least, a clunky Nokia in between? Aside from probably never coming home from school and writing a letter to your best friend for double English the next morning. Or never having to ring the local pub to track down friends on a Friday night? Or aside from never being able to roam free without your own personal tracking device?
A whole lot of people in China, Latin America and India are about to find out. I’m as loath to talk about the “penetration” of mobile technology in expanding markets as the next person, but it’s an interesting thought; all of these communities, these adults, whose first interaction with the mobile will be the smartphone.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a sucker for a bit of nostalgia but I fully appreciate the benefits of modern technology. At the same time, I was 19 or thereabouts when I bought my first mobile – a Siemens, as far as I can remember. It was probably a year or more before it occurred to me to turn off the incessant beep-beep-beeping that nowadays would send me plummeting over the nearest cliff, so I can’t have been sending that many texts.
My formative years, therefore, were relatively unscathed by the magical picture/music/flashy mini-TV in my pocket that so enthralls my little sister. She’s all eyes and Maisy now, but it won’t be long before she “needs” one of her own. And God love him, but you know my dad will be just as nostalgic for the days of hushed calls on landlines as I am. There are all sorts of fears, besides the cost, besides spoiling her, besides table manners, besides the fact we’re all apparently addicted to our phones, besides Rupert Murdoch and his merry band of hackers.
Not to get all Maude Flanders about it, but most terrifying is the issue of access. Not only that she could have outright access to that internet we hear so much about (in my day, we had the saucy line drawings of an Encyclopedia Britannica knock-off, volume Q-R), but that a smartphone will make her so much more accessible to the outside world and to a level of non-stop socialising – and, potentially, bullying – that my teenage self couldn’t quite have comprehended.
The smartphone is a wonderful bit of technology, but still the payphone had its . . . please insert more coins.
Róisín Ingle returns next week