Don’t have a smartphone – you’re a chump

It wasn’t really that long ago when the idea of having a carphone literally meant having a phone in your car and which you paid a really hefty price for. Then came the early days of cellphones and feeling like you were holding something the size and weight of a brick up to your ear. Those days have changed and just about everyone has, at the minimum, a cellphone.

Even I broke down this year and got one even though it was only because I got a deal on it and considering my health makes my wife a little more secure knowing I can get a hold of her at any time. As much as it might be a security blanket in our home for most people it has become their only form of telephone as the number of people opting strictly for cellphone has seen a decline in wireline phones.

However even that perception of cellphones being the standard is changing as more and more people are moving up to smartphones and all the services thy provide. In many cases that smartphone is becoming a lifeline both personally and in our business lives.

For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smartphone, analysts say, is the instrument of that connectedness — and thus worth the cost, both as a communications tool and as a status symbol.

“The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail.”

The spread of those social assumptions may signal a technological crossover that echoes the proliferation of e-mail itself more than a decade ago. At some point in the early 1990s, it became socially unacceptable — at least for many people — to not have an e-mail address.

Source: New York Times

It is this same type of attitude that is driving the sale of smartphones even if it means counting pennies or doing without other things. It is no longer a luxury, or a gadget, but is in fact becoming a social and business norm. In many places if you aren’t connected using a smartphone you are looked upon as being the next best thing to a luddite.

There is a downside according to psychologists though

The smartphone, said Mr. Meyer, a cognitive psychologist, can be seen as a digital “Skinner box,” a reference to the experiments of the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner in which rats were conditioned to press a lever repeatedly to get food pellets.

With the smartphone, he said, the stimuli are information feeds. “It can be powerfully reinforcing behavior,” he said. “But the key is to make sure this technology helps you carry out the tasks of daily life instead of interfering with them. It’s about balance and managing things.”

Jeez .. I just get caught up with the cool kids and get a cellphone only to find out I’m still behind. Hopefully this same thing won’t happen if I managed to pull off a really good seal and join the really cool kids and et myself a MacBook laptop – because that would really suck crabapples.