Is Your Smartphone Making You a Smartass?

Love it or hate it, the iPhone is significant–not just technologically, but culturally. We are even coining words (iPhoneisms?) to describe its societal impact. There’s “iPhone Envy” (aka “iPhone Lust”), “iPhonization”, and now we have “awkward iPhone moments”. These happen when a question arises and someone whips out their iPhone to look up the answer, stemming further conversation. Here is an example, as described in a recent LA Times article:

Backstage recently in a Little Rock, Ark., theater, actress Natalie Canerday said the cast of a play was enjoying debating the year Bruce Springsteen’s album “Born to Run” was released. Then the director took out his iPhone. All conversation stopped as he sought the answer: 1975, according to Wikipedia. “Everyone said, ‘Oh,’ ” Canerday recalled.

Indeed this can happen with any phone, but the user interface on the iPhone is just more conducive to browsing, so more people are doing it. According to a recent M:Metrics study, 58.6 percent of iPhone users visited a search engine on their phones, compared with 37 percent of smartphone users in general and a scant 6.1 percent of mobile phone users.

The problem is this constant accessing of information can make the iPhone/smartphone owner come off as a know-it-all, eliciting groans from friends.

When [Nora Wells is] with iPhone-toting friends and a question comes up, she braces herself, as she did recently when it was suggested that they go out for beers “stat.” Inevitably, someone wanted the exact definition. “The iPhone even gave us the Latin,” said Wells… “We probably could have been having our beer in the amount of time it took to look it up.”

The ultimate question is: does technology make us dumber? We are essentially outsourcing our brains. When your phone is smart, who needs to learn anything for real? But it can also be argued that the accessibility of information just means better, faster education. For example, Nora did just soak up some Latin instead of a beer. Perhaps we are just becoming a society of knowledge masters, learning how to wield and access information rather than storing the minutiae in our brains. But until everyone has a smartphone, people just need to use them wisely. No one likes a smartass.