Just got back from a road trip from Ann Arbor to Missoula. I was accompanied by two good friends, one of which had an IPhone, the other of which had a Blackberry. I have neither of these mobile technologies. Due to the sudden and complete immersion into a social atmosphere in a limited physical space (my car) in which the distribution of technology was unequeal, I came away with some thoughts on what the technologies mean/do to us.
First off, its silly to say that the technology is good or bad. It is both. The better questions are: "when do these technologies cause social or emotional tension and when do they provide enjoyable experiences for the group or the individual?"
I pointed out to my friends that the use of these phones was stunting conversation in the car and thus making the trip worse for (at the very least) me and potentially alienating us from one another (we don't hang out very often b/c we live in different cities). I felt doubly alienated b/c I didn't know what they were doing on the phones. Were they playing a video game, reading an article, talking to someone else? I felt like I wasn't entertaining enough to be chosen over these other options, which was annoying. They informed me that they were mostly checking and responding to work email. They acknowledged my concerns, but said they wouldn't be able to take vacations like this unless they had devices on whcih to check in on work. Thus, they viewed the phones as enabling more vacation time, more social flexibility, which would make up for the minimal tension created when they both logged on and I sat there doing nothing.
Other times, the phones were used to answer questions, as kind of an Oracle to defer to, to settle disputes. We would argue over how geographers determined where the exact center of the United States was, or who an actor was in a TV show, and instead of going back and forth, we ventured guesses and then confirmed them using the internet. There's something about always having this technology with you (especially if you're out of the house often) that makes its impact on conversations, disputes, and knowledge that much more profound. Most often, we'd have a conversation about anything, then look up something related on wikipedia, and cite some obscure, amusing, related fact. So it was sort of an augmented conversation. I learned more, but it did seem to suck the spontineity out of the conversation at times. And there's something troubling about people citing jokes from the internet instead of making their own.
But the best/worst thing about them was their abilities to navigate. We had a big road atlas which we used, sometimes as a primary source of navigation and other times as a backup to the IPhone. We were aware of the hazards of using the IPhone or GPS as exclusive navigation device. The interesting thing is that those devices have deficiencies (inability to take into account some things a long term resident might know, like the tendency of a resident to park their car too close to the road, thus blocking us from passing) but every deficiency could be corrected if the technology is sufficietly open. The IPhone led us to a closed-for-repair pizza joint in Chicago and a blocked dirt road in Montana. But if someone had been able to upload their personal knowledge of those places and it had instantly updated and been registered in a program that looks for patterns, then the device could incorporate the "folk wisdom" of local residents and been more effective. It was easy to say "there you go, making a false idol out of technology. Nothing will be as good as good ol' fashion human intuition," but I think that misses the point.
In the end, I don't think that the technological inequality detrimentally affected the social vibe in the car. We talked about as much as I would be happy w/ (a lot, to the point where if we talked any more, I would've lost my voice). If I had to venture one possible effect the technology had on the content of our conversations, it was the promotion of non-personal subjects over personal ones. You can't look on the internet for how you feel about something or something about your personal life, but you can look on it for just about everything else. You can even look up people you know on Facebook while talking about them, but that won't tell you how you feel about them. We never really talked too deeply about our personal lives, but maybe that's b/c we've always tended to joke around and debate various topics instead of getting all touchy-feely. Though maybe the tendencies of guys to use mobile technology around one another in certain ways, e.g. to look up stuff, is different from girls' tendencies to do this and that augments a pre-existing gap between single-gender groups in terms of how touchy-feely they get in conversations.
If nothing else, I wasn't sold on the idea of either of these technologies being worth what they're priced at. When I'm sitting at home by myself, its nice to have TV and internet. They are, in some sense, competing w/ books or me staring into space and being introspective. Mobile technologies like the IPhone, for me, would be competing w/ music, podcasts, NPR, and talking to other people, all of which cost me pretty much nothing and all of which kick ass.
