Outsmart Your Phone

Been a while, people.

First, let me ask you a question:

Are you in control of your phone? Or is it the other ways around?

“What? Ofc I’m in control of my phone! How else it gonna live without me?! It’s just a thing and I’m the user! I charge it every 6 hours, pay the bill ON TIME, buy it tampered glass, download apps so it would run steady, and it sync me my freaking mail!”

Well, I won’t claim a new clinical disorder or judge you on how addicted you are to your phone. Trust me, I hate that kind of post. Smartphone is an indispensable tools in this new world. I mean, how else you gonna check your hot high school friends? Or how else you gonna know what your partner do IN THIS SECOND? (yes, I see what you did, dear). It’s cool to have a real time information on people. Aside from its primary function, smartphone work just great to enhance your daily work (will get to this later), and the social media were just so... awesome.

Parallelly, we’re seeing a new generation of kids that wildly exposed to smartphone and tablet, hence the iKids generation. Few years ago, my niece (2yo atm) holds some old phone, swipe the screen with his little finger like he usually did with iPad, and show a face that just says “this no work, uncle”. This is both awesome and scary. It’s awesome because it were so intuitive that even a kids can generalize two different things RIGHT AWAY, and scary because they will be the generation that won’t realize that there used to be times when we scroll to see stuff, and they would be frightened with the fact that there IS actually things that can’t be swiped.

No, I’m not saying that blah blah stuff about how it has ruined our life, relationship, and our back. Nor that I said that kids shouldn’t be exposed by iPad or Android tablets at such early ages. I think the main point we could see here is that smartphone give us a great number of affordances to do nearly everything we need to do. And I think that we should selectively choose what affordances we will be using on our phone.

Oh! Yeah, Affordances. Affordances is a relation between an object and an organism that afford the opportunity for that organism to perform action. Simply put, affordances of my pencil is for writing or drawing (mostly just weird stuff and dinosaur [dinosaur is not weird]).

Let’s take a look at my phone.  Here’s my selected affordances of this device:

•  Take a picture
• Sync email
• Writing
• Listening to music
• Watching video
• Read newspaper
• Read & listen to Ebooks
• Play some game
• Drawing with my s pen
• Discover new knowledge & learn online
• Track my expenses
• Reminder and Planner
• Journal writing
• Social Media
• Call a cab/ojek
• Calculate
• Discover new community
• Personal coach
• Much more..

Please remember that it’s not even its primary function, which is (only) to call and text.

Great tools need great care and knowledge. Used rightly, even a mediocre priced phone will outsmart the high-end one, if not used properly. However, I recognized a funny pattern on how human use his/her phone. You know there’s two kind of people, right? People who classify other people (me lol) and people who did not.

From when I see, there is three kind of smartphone user:

A: Human < Smartphone

 

A type people is the kind of people who wired to his phone and can’t resist its temptation. It could be some ordinary guy, or even your boss. They usually have no idea that his life constantly sapped by their phone. A typical A type is the kind of guy who ALWAYS in constant need to post and check-in on his social media. The other phenomenon is this kind of boy who play “Crash of Clams” literally anywhere, and being completely controlled by the game mechanism that he HAVE TO open the apps every time notification shows on screen. Remember, when you’re not the one who control the game dynamics, it’s not you who play the games, but the game plays you. *insert scary music and girl screaming*

His/her phone were like this:

• Their social media contain 10-12 daily updates
• Their game: farming, time-controlled game mechanism. Srsly, avoid this kind of games, no matter how fun it is.
• Chained to charger & socket, even use the phone while charging
• If you hide their phone or turned off wifi for 6 hours, your home is already wrecked.

B: Human = Smartphone

B people were rather smart, or in the other words, average. They download normally used apps, keeps it in moderate, and managed to have offline social life. They may feel their smartphone controlled them sometimes, but they strikes back. They enslave them by constantly syncing email and reminding their needs, while the smartphone demands them back to bought fancy apps to keep them running.

Just imagine your normal smartphone life. Wasn’t that hard, right?

C: Human > Smartphone

C people is the top crop. They didn’t necessarily need to be smart, but they know they don’t want to be outsmarted by things. If you never heard such apps as IF by IFTTT or Tasker, or never heard ProductHunt or Slack, you’re not one of them. Everything they need to do is usually one swipe away from them. Sync, Cloud, Share and Integrate is their mantras. They’d even root/jailbreak just to get in control. Their smartphone know what they usually do when they get home and recommend that right away. If you connect bluetooth to their car, it will automatically play song AND navigate you based on current hour AND order you pizza that catch up EXACTLY where you will be standing when it’s ready WHILE automatically notify their nearby friends on his upcoming time AND give text to their mother. This is the kind of guy say “what a time to be alive” in the end of day.

So, the affordances is there. It’s not stupid to be with your phone all the time, but It’s stupid if you can’t control it for your advantage.

“what would be the trade-off, of an (almost) omnipotence and omniscience devices?”