I was thinking the other day about how “Smartphones” aren’t very aptly named. Because, simply, they aren’t very “smart” from a certain point of view. I think they are less “smart” than we have been led to believe. For instance, to make an analogy with a person… People KNOW BETTER than to share things with others that will purposefully enrage them. But a great deal of what we see and hear coming out of our smartphones is just that: things more or less designed to get our goat. Yet somehow, the smartphone itself is never to blame for all the horrible things it exposes us to. Not for showing us people in better shape than we are, people who have more money than we do, people with higher paying jobs, more powerful cars, prettier spouses, easier lifestyles, more accomplished credentials, better behaved children, bigger houses, the list goes on. The phone is not to blame for exposing us to things that rile us up, make us feel insecure, small, bad about ourselves, etc. So it becomes an added responsibility on us, the smartphone user, to be careful consumers, mindful, aware that the fire hose of media pouring out of these little things we hold in our hands must be taken with a grain of salt. All this on top of keeping in mind our goals, aspirations, daily tasks that this new technology is supposedly helping us with.

If a person up and showed us lots and lots of pictures of people who are better off than we are for no genuinely good reason, we’d probably get upset with him/her and, at the very least, ask him/her not to do that or to be sensitive to the fact that we are sensitive about our social status/size of our house/level of physical fitness/so on and so forth. They might not stop even if we asked them true, but they would probably get the message to some degree or another.

In my mind, a genuinely “smart” technology would not pepper us with reasons to feel bad about ourselves/our bodies/our cars/our houses/our jobs/whatever but would find ways to lift us up when we are unsure of ourselves, in doubt about out self-worth.

So in truth, I think the smartphone technology has a long way to go before it is truly “smart” as you might say. In its current form, it is more like an arm of powerful corporations and advertisers than something which is actually smart by human standards. I have to fall back on my analogy to a person here.

Smartphones can be endlessly entertaining it is true but they have real sense of restraint, of compassion, or awareness of the mind state of their user. It could be said that maybe its best that they don’t because if they did, they could curtail our freedoms. Be that as it may, smartphones may be smart by some standards but they have a long way to go before they figure out how to lift us up instead of bringing us down or merely encouraging us to feed the advertising/corporate machinery they were spawned from.