Tuesday, April 12, 2016

The Digital Leash

Mobile appeals to control-oriented individuals because of the potential to extend their command over great distances – but fail to consider that they are also nodes on the network, and are subject to the commands of others.  With a mobile device in your pocket, you are a node that others will seek to access and control.    And this can be dehumanizing and disempowering.

Consider the use of the telephone, mobile or otherwise: people delight in the ability to place outbound calls at their convenience, but find that inbound calls are an unwanted intrusion on their private lives.  While we generally do not mind the occasional call from friends and family, a call from the office or from a telemarketer is generally unpleasant and unwanted. 

Even when you yield to the schedules of others – expecting a call from someone – it is an unpleasant experience: people exhibit signs of anxiety and distraction, unable to focus on their current situation and those in their immediate environment because they are expecting the phone to ring, and show signs of panic when it does not.  This is not “empowerment.”

Security measures likewise reduce the power of the user: if you’ve forgotten a password, or accidentally locked yourself out of a device, the process to regain access is often extremely difficult.


As such, the mobile phone aggravates as often as it empowers, and it tops the list of surveys of devices that users feel they “hate the most but cannot live without.”

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