Discussing smartphone use with various people recently, I quickly come back to the same question - what do you need it for? This is not a masked way of saying they don’t need a smartphone, but a genuine question. I’m personally happy to accept that people use smartphones for a variety of reasons, from professional work, to having to pay for parking, and from medical technology to not having access to laptops or computers.
So maybe a stepping stone to better co-design of smartphone use is to be more open about what we need to use our phones for, and why we carry them around with us. This post, then, is a bit of an experiment to start surfacing thoughts. The question is applicable to all devices, but I figure a) better to start somewhere specific, and b) smartphones are a particularly “invasive” device. So…
Which functions on your smartphone do you feel you NEED it for, and why?
To start, I’d say there are some things I like to have my phone on me for - camera, photo editing, note-taking. But the things I probably need it for on the go are:
- Necessary contact from family and friends via phone call, text and (specific) group chats
- Parking apps, as paying by machine often isn’t available here
- Finding directions in strange places
- Access to passwords and one-time codes
- Transferring emergency funds to kids’ bank cards
- Checking my calendar
I guess there will be a lot of overlap, but that’s good to know. And it would also be interesting to know what less common cases exist: I think a mindful tech movement risks coming from a privileged position, and so awareness of these less common needs is all an essential part of the discussion.
There are no right or wrong answers here, just the opportunity to open up and find out from others :)
This a really great question. I honestly can’t think of a single thing that I could not do if I didn’t have a smartphone. This is interesting because this is how it used to be, and it seems like that changed, but maybe it didn’t. I might do an experiment for a week where I don’t use my smartphone and see how it goes.
I miss the short period of time between when WiFi came out and before smart phones. You had to pull out your laptop and find free public WiFi in order to go online to make plans and search (or use an Internet cafe), and then you would have to leave the WiFi to actually go do things. This made it so we had IRL, and we could still share memories and socialize online, but those were separate. This was the last era where we had a proper separation between “going online” and being offline. After that, we are always online, mindlessly pulling out our phones to “socialize” or doom scroll.
Yeah that was kind of a “strange” limbo time - I remember going traveling and having to find internet cafes or hotel computers to use to send messages back home. Feels like ripe material and a lens for thinking about these things again…