The smartphone between the present and the future: Five changes

The incorporation of everyday life

The first change that I point out here is the ongoing capability of the mobile phone (and now the smartphone) to colonize everyday life. This dominance of the smartphone over other technologies is due to its closeness to the human body, already described in the early 2000s (Oksman & Rautiainen, 2002). This fact explains not only its supremacy but also the radical nature of the social changes it has facilitated. The smartphone makes an ever-increasing number of societies’ domains available for consumption while people are on the move or wherever they happen to be at the moment (Vorderer et al., 2018). This also means that we are available for work and production wherever we might be (Mullan & Wajcman, 2017).

Being a metamedium (Humphreys et al., 2018; Jensen, 2016), the smartphone also effortlessly incorporates into itself other technologies and platforms (e.g., the computer, camera, internet, radio, television, newspapers, etc.). We can speak, write, read, learn, do mathematical operations, take photographs and videos, control their schedules, coordinate with others, express emotions, pray, check calendars, search for places, get information (and archive it), and also communicate. We can also access social media, read the news, do banking and ecommerce, play games, and get health data.

The smartphone offers an incredible number of opportunities to redesign the attitudes, habits, routines, and behaviors of everyday life. The implications of our use affect many dimensions of human existence: the ontological as well as the anthropological. For example, not only do we have new ways to keep our memories, but we develop another relationship with our memories (Humphreys, 2018; Özkul & Humphreys, 2015). The smartphone allows us not only to visualize and represent our past reality, but we can also change the ways in which we perceive it.

As noted above, there are so many pieces of our everyday life and dimensions of our existence that are encompassed by the smartphone that it is difficult to list them. However, I argue that if this is the reality we experience today, the reality of tomorrow will be the incorporation of even more pieces of our reality, society, and culture into this technological artifact. Everything points to the fact that this process will expand incessantly into the future.

The disappearance of the voice in the smartphone and its implications for communication/sociality

The second change concerns the progressive disappearance of the voice in mobile communication. This has important implications within two strongly intertwined spheres, namely communication and sociality.

In the last decade, the ability to access an internet connection via the smartphone has made it increasingly similar to the computer. Moreover, this development has meant that writing on the smartphone, as is common on the computer, has increasingly supplanted the voice, to the point that the smartphone has substantially abdicated the voice. The voice has come back to life recently in voice-based messaging apps or in a hybrid form—human/artificial—when we communicate with voice-based virtual assistants. In the first case, people record their short, audio messages within an architecture of asynchronous communication. In the second case, they speak to virtual assistants using their voice, but the answer they get is from the artificial voice of a virtual assistant.

These cases aside, this shift from orality to writing deserves careful attention. It produces profound effects on our lives that often go unnoticed. As Ong (1982) has argued, orality and writing are two modes of language. They endorse different relationships at several levels; that is, between the communicator and themselves, between the communicator and others, and between the communicator and the surrounding world. Thus, they originate different cognitive, emotional, and relational structures of communication and interaction. Following Ong, oral communication develops memory and represents the immediacy and the bodily and emotional extension of humans. Writing, while it has many positive features, represents the freezing of oral communication, and is an individual activity that requires isolation from the outside world. This shift in mobile communication was originally propelled by economic forces (writing is less costly to transmit than voice). Writing, however, has remained, even after the original reasons for its development fell away. Indeed, writing text messages (and now WhatsApp, Line, Messenger, etc.) has become an engrained part of our use. The cost of sending text messages is not a consideration in the mind of the users.

The macro level implications of this are that the smartphone has reduced the presence of human voices. As the voice represents an extension of the individual's body, the humanness of mobile communication, which was already compromised by the dynamics of presence/absence (Gergen, 2002), has been further reduced. In addition to the progressive removal of individuals’ physical presence from the communication context, smartphone use has contributed to the removal of the voice. Many scholars (e.g., Vanden Abeele, 2020) have studied how smartphone use has contributed to the separation of co-present individuals from one another. They suggest that this “phubbing” devalues those who are physically present in favor of absent individuals with whom people talk on the smartphone. Slipped between themselves and others who are physically present, the device distracts us in many ways: for example, watching a funny video, reading the latest messages, taking pictures, checking bank statements, etc.

Looking back in time, during the first phase of its development, the voice of those with whom we spoke made itself heard by others who were physically nearby. It thus constituted an important physical trace of the remote other. With the progressive transformation of the smartphone into a computer, silence has also fallen between the two co-located people, accentuating the devaluation of people's physical presence.

The smartphone appears to be the most relevant celebrant of this new bodiless dimension of communication and social relations. It co-generates a new emptiness and a lack of humanness in social relationships. With the increased individualization of society, this process seems to be destined to expand in the future.

The smartphone as incubator of new technologies such as voice-based virtual assistants

The third change regards the capability of the smartphone to be an incubator of new technologies. It is in the smartphone that robotic voice-based virtual assistants started. Siri was introduced by Apple in 2011 within the body of the iPhone. This was followed by Cortana, which was implemented by Microsoft in 2014. Eventually, these mobile voice-based assistants came out of the material bodies of smartphones and landed in stand-alone devices such as the Google Nest Hub.

It does not stop here. The smartphone lends itself to many uses in the field of robotics, where it is an integrated tool both in the various prototyping processes and in the final products. Social robots often have cell phones integrated into their material bodies. In other cases, the smartphone takes over the remote-control function of the robot. Others have suggested an even more profound connection between the smartphone and robotics. For example, Sugiyama (2013) has proposed looking at the social robot as a quasi-robot, and Vincent (2013) has suggested considering the smartphone with its user a personalized robot. The point is that digital technologies and robotics have not only evolved together, but are also destined to co-evolve in the future, and therefore we also need to start studying them together.

Looking at the smartphone as an important space of innovation opens up a window to the future. I argue that the smartphone is the best candidate to become a connecting tool between new communication and information technologies, domestic appliances, social robotics, and the various technological infrastructures of the home (ranging from heating to electrical systems). This will perhaps re-incorporate voice-based virtual assistants into the smartphone after their phase as a separate device. Indeed, I argue that the design of home automation processes can only progress through the smartphone.

Fashion failed to colonize the smartphone and definitely left room for design

The fourth change affects the aesthetics of the mobile phone as a physical artifact. Ten years ago, the competition between fashion and design in mobile phones was still alive. Now fashion companies have retired from the mobile phone business, and design has won over fashion. Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, and so on, dropped their engagement with the world of mobile phones for two reasons. First, the long-established idea of the mobile phone as a jewel/ornament/fashion symbol has faltered. Perhaps relatedly, the smartphone has lost the charm of the new. In fact, considering the smartphone to be a new technology has lost its currency. Indeed, it is perhaps the most appropriated and integrated communication and information technology in people's everyday lives.

Along the way, it was discovered that smartphones do not need to be fashionable to harmonize within a system of clothing. This is because they powerfully create a system of meaning that is closed in on itself (and which does not come into dialogue with the vestimentary system). This resonates with Simmel's (1908) idea, developed in the work he dedicated to the study of associative forms, that the social spheres must remain separate for society to function. Although today there are powerful initiatives for the convergence of languages, systems, and forms, in the post-domestication phase of the smartphone, the technological artifact has taken a decidedly separate path from the sphere of fashion. Fashion, by its nature, needs to systematically change materials, shapes, and colors. By contrast, technology resists change due to the inertia generated by the structural features of electro-mechanics, sensors, and artificial intelligence. Design as practiced with the mobile phone deals with “heavy” and not impalpable materials. As such, the “aesthetic” evolution of the technological object sees minimal changes because the real change occurs not on the surface, but inside the body of the smartphone. It is the updating of the operating system and the enrichment of the functions and features of the smartphone that companies such as Apple, Samsung, and others aim to use to “convince” their customers to change models on a regular basis. Following this decision-making, fashion is now turning much more into the social robot, the very new medium of communication, as Taipale and Fortunati (2018), Taipale et al. (2020), Hepp (2020), and Natale and Cooke (2020) have argued. Perennial fashion updating is now realized through robotics at the level of experimentation with the movements of materials and shapes (e.g., Chalayan's mechatronic fashion), scenography (e.g., in fashion shows), body language (the conception of increasingly robotized models’ body; e.g., Danese [2022]) and the growth of convergence of technology and fashion in the field of techno fashion (with the correlated concepts of wearables and smart clothes).

This shift has implicated the acquisition of more degrees of freedom by users to approach and manage these two important spheres—technology and fashion—without the need to harmonize them within a unitary style. I argue that this separation is likely to continue in the future.

The smartphone in the network of personal technologies

The last change concerns the strategies with which we study the mobile phone. These need to be revisited given the device's insertion into a network of various technologies.

To make sense of wide social phenomena, such as mobility, Fortunati and Taipale (2017) proposed to use the notion of the network of personal technologies. The point raised by them is that the current, technological ecology shows a strong interconnection between communication and information technologies. However, studying these separately may not provide a wide sense of the actual practices of use, and of the different tasks that users assign to them according to their needs.

In this way, we never learn how individuals manage the various tools within the same framework. We do not find the reasons why they decide to use one tool in one context and another tool in another. Nor do we apprehend a specific appreciation of the various devices’ capabilities in their spatial and temporal modes of use.

It is true that the smartphone is perhaps our most important communication and information tool today. Given the incorporation of the internet, the majority of people now access this network through their smartphones and not through their computers. Indeed, as Yao and Ling (2020) have reported, it is the smartphone through which most computer-mediated communication takes place. However, analyzing the smartphone alone (and this applies to any other communication and information technology), is a methodological expedient that risks giving us a false picture of the routines and practices of use. It risks giving only a partial view of the strategies and behaviors applied by people because we know only what they do with a specific tool.

This opens up an important question: Does it still make sense to study the smartphone in a technological vacuum as if it were the only existing technology? The specialization of studies in mobile communication has brought a lot of useful knowledge. However, the need to look at digital and analog technologies as a stellium that produces complementary or competing effects is increasingly pressing. I argue that the future of the smartphone should be conceived and designed together with the set of digital technologies that increasingly integrate with each other (Jensen, 2022).