Читать книгу Homo Cypiens - Herlander Elias - Страница 20

Japanese girls walking in the streets staring at smartphones are called cybikos; they are the "cyber-girls" of the mobile media and digital media age. Every day, they socialize, go shopping, and attend entertainment events in terms of contents, all through the smartphone. These young women symbolize an archetype of the youth of the current times as the ones who never turn off smartphones. As it is of public knowledge these pocket computers need, like any digital media, to be restarted from time to time. If the devices are not turned off, this means that they have become the favorite device — the remote control for everything that happens on a daily basis: chatting, sending messages, calling, accessing the Net or simply taking photos or using the numberless apps.

In general, young people today are like this. They are always "on", they do not hang up. They perform several tasks through these new mobile media and are more alert to what happens on these generous screen devices than to what actually happens off-screen. The smartphone screen has become the first screen, or the first reality. If something happens, then it has to appear on this screen. If it does not appear on this screen it is because it did not happen. Being always connected to the smartphone has a price — you start seeing the world as a set of applications and in case you need to solve any situation in the real world, you have to search a specific app to solve that particular problem. That is how young people think, with the pockets of their clothes altered to accommodate the generous-screen smartphones. It is also true that smartphones have become a seductive product where everything counts, from the user experience (UX) to the design of the elements that appear on the screens. The smartphone is basically a pocket computer with a big screen. This means that the device that dominates our lives and replaced the GPS, the camera, the notepad, the game console and the computer is still a computer, but small. This pocket computer is a revolutionary device. We do not buy this device just because we need it, but because we want to buy it. It is not a product of a consumerist society, but a product of a society of desire.

The smartphone brought a revolution to our everyday lives. Possessing a computer in your pocket is one thing, but having an online computer at your fingertips nurtured free access to the network. Now, it is possible to have Net twenty-four hours over twenty-four hours — the equipment that accompanies us from waking up to bedtime is the smartphone and it's called smartphone because it is a smart device. If we add to this functional side social network, we have a super-seductive cocktail. We can start friendships by SMS, we can call people and take photos or activate meetings by videoconference, make accounts, open files, turn off lights, going shopping and order something to be sent to our real address. The smartphone brand and the type of ecosystem brand to which it belongs also say something about us. Nowadays, the youth that is always clinging to smartphones belong to brand tribes. Within smartphones, apps are also brands and social networks are corporate identities too. The commercial world merged with the world of telecommunications. The result of this is is that when we talk to someone we do not know if we are being recorded. Everything goes to the Net, and today, an individual becomes a legion. When we talk to someone we are talking to the world, with all sorts of consequences that this entails.

Smartphones are also a sexy, ergonomic, autonomous product. They replace the Radio and TV, computer and typewriter, pager and landline, fax and photocopying machine. There are about 2 trillion transistors in most cases inside a smartphone. It was not possible to take a computer to each child’s "home" in Africa, as it was the case in the 1990s. However, curiously, a low-cost smartphone manufactured in China or India was put in the hands of each person. The four major groups of smartphones are Google, Apple, Huawei and Samsung brands. Besides this, social networks can be augmented taking advantage of the smartphones functionalities by adding smart features to their users’ lives, whether they are cybikosor mobile media boys.

A noticeable thing is that the rise of smartphones, as a device that allows us to be always connected, led to the fall of the sale of notebook and desktop computers. Since everything can now be registered in the cloud, owning devices with their own empty space has become a luxury. The most practical is to use the Net and record everything in the cloud because it stores almost everything referring to the average user of digital media. Your smartphone works as a remote control for anyone accessing to contents from long distance. However, this feature remains: the distance. It is the distance that keeps the time of telecommunications. Some psychiatrists and psychologists even argue that the smartphone has reinforced loneliness that it has created an infinite loneliness and that the way to break it is by making a phone call. On the other hand, if the user keeps the Net active on the smartphone, he can access to social networks, as an escape from loneliness and as a virtual place to meet new friends.