Smartphones

Last week I presented my case study on smartphones and how they have come to affect society. Smartphones have come to be a crucial part of our day-to-day business. The first smartphone was started out in 1992 by IBM. IBM named the phone that they produced “Simon.” Simon was able to have a calendar, games, send and receive fax, a notepad, and a calculator. Since then telecommunications companies have developed more intellectual phones and have added cameras, wireless internet, and countless other applications that make our day-to-day business easily accessible, fast, and efficient. These new applications have enables us to be mobile while still communicating with each other. While most of our cell phones are of the 2G or 2.5G generation, phones are now coming out in the 3G generation. 3G is giving us the opportunity to have faster internet, download documents faster, and better reception on our phones worldwide. Multitasking with our phone, e.g. talking on the phone while looking at a map is also another function that the new 3G is letting us do.
Even further I focused on how smartphones have had an impact on our society. We looked at a book by Jarice Hanson titled “24/7: How cell phones and the internet are affecting the way we live, work, and play.” In the book the author talks about the age differences and how they use their phones differently. People at younger ages such as 18-27 personalize their phones much more and use them for more tasks than do people who are ages 45+. The author also makes a point that because we rely so much on our phones we have become less communicative in that we abbreviate everything into letters or shortened words. What used to be a relationship between people has become letters on a screen no bigger than the palm of your hand. We also looked at a lawsuit from citizens of Berkley, CA who are suing Verizon Corp., Nextel, the City of Berkley, and Patrick Kennedy, who is the owner of a storage unit business where the telecoms want to place 18 new antennas. The citizens are worried for their safety saying that it is unfair to place those antennas in only their part of the town. They aren’t opposed to them they just want the spread throughout the city where the radio frequency radiation would be evenly distributed and not going directly into their homes. Smartphones have a smaller service area and thus need more antennas to get the reception that we are used to. Technology is a must have in today’s society however, are we actually communicating less because we are able to communicate in such a fast and efficient manner? Has society lost its ability to have personalized relationships and communication?