What is a Smartphone?
By L.M. Sacasas
The question seems ridiculous until you pause to give it a moment’s reflection. “Smart” is a meaningless modifier, and making and receiving calls is often one of the least used features of a smartphone. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that some users would be glad if their phones didn’t receive voice calls, which lately tend to be mostly from our old friend, “Potential Spam.”
Then what exactly is a smartphone? There are any number of descriptive definitions we could propose. We could simply call it an “internet connected device,” for example. But this isn’t very helpful. If we were to attempt a definition that reflected the way smartphones are used, the number of potential uses would render any such definition useless. We use it to communicate in a variety of modes, to document, to buy and sell, to find our way, to entertain ourselves, to track (or be tracked through) a vast array of metrics. The list goes on and on. Not only would any such attempt to define a smartphone be impractical, it would still fail to answer the question. It would miss the essence of the thing.
To be fair, I’m not sure that I myself have a good definition that adequately gets at the essence of the smartphone. It might be helpful, though, to think about a smartphone not in terms of what we do with it but what it does with us. As the McLuhanesque aphorism has it, “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
Discussions about technology tend to focus on the uses to which a tool or device is put by the user. Certainly, most of the moral dimensions of technology tend to be reduced to this question of use. But this is not the only way, or even the best way, to think about technology. A better approach would be to examine how a technology mediates our experience. This approach, pioneered by philosopher of technology Don Ihde, recognizes that the moral significance of any tool resides neither entirely on the side of the tool’s design nor entirely on the side of the user’s intent. Rather, it also resides in the interplay between user intent and tool design.
For example, consider the familiar quip, “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It's a pithy formulation and captures an important truth, even if it doesn't say everything that is worth saying about technology and even if we would do well to qualify it in certain respects. The truth it captures is that our tools, regardless of the particular use to which we put them, are intellectually, emotionally, and morally formative. This principle is underwritten by two prior principles.
First, that we are, as the saying goes, creatures of habit. Taking a virtue ethic approach to moral formation helps us better perceive the power of our tools to shape us. What we do over and over again becomes habit, habit becomes inclination and disposition, which becomes vice or virtue, which constitutes character, from which action and desire spring. By encouraging or discouraging the formation of habits, technologies like smartphones play a critical role in shaping who we are becoming over time.
Second, how we interpret the world is a function of how we perceive it, or, to collapse the two together: perception is interpretation. And perception is often mediated by our tools. How I see the world—myself and others included—is often a technologically mediated act of interpretation.
With these considerations in mind, then we might say that digital devices like smartphones are tools for the cultivation of habits, whether those are habits we deliberately choose to cultivate or those which others might want to see cultivated in us is another matter.
Likewise we might say that smartphones are instruments of perception. That is to say that whenever we use and whatever use we put them to, we should not only consider what we are doing but how our use of the device is shaping our perception of the world. This can happen both by what our use of a smartphone encourages us to see and what it discourages us from seeing. It may also be a function of how it clarifies or obscures our vision.
Finally, I’d like to also consider one additional angle on the smartphone, which draws on the work of the mid-20th century French theorist and lay theologian, Jacques Ellul.
Writing in 1954, Jacques Ellul warned about “the convergence on man of a plurality, not of techniques, but of systems or complexes of techniques.” “The result,” he warned, “is an operational totalitarianism; no longer is any part of man free and independent of these techniques.”
In his day, however, these complexes of techniques were still clunky: “the technical operations involved do not appear to fit well together,” Ellul acknowledged, “and only by means of a new technique of organization will it be possible to unite the different pieces into a whole.”
I would submit that we can read this prophetically and find the fulfillment of the “new technique of organization” that will unleash “unrecognized potentialities for influencing the individual” in digital technology, which has made it possible to interlock and synthesize the whole array of existing techniques of surveillance and discipline while wildly improving their efficiency, scope, and power.
We might even go so far as to see in the smartphone the symbol of technical convergence. A whole assemblage of political, economic, psychological, and social techniques find in this digital device a focal point upon which to converge on the human being.
From this perspective then, we could answer the question “What is a smartphone?” in this way: it is the point at which the formative powers of a wide array of cultural, economic, and technological forces converge upon the individual
While I do not think that any of these considerations exhaust all the possibilities, I trust that they have given us something to consider as we reflect on the influence of devices that have become a nearly ubiquitous feature of our lives.
L.M. Sacasas is the author of The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and society.
