When the mobile telephone and the internet first emerged, it was by no means clear that they were destined to converge. Their purposes seemed different. The mobile telephone was for speaking to people when one was on the move. The internet was for e-mail—a sort of improved fax—and for websites, an entity whose nature and purpose were as yet obscure.
Moreover, both mobile telephone and internet seemed to be primarily for business people, because of both their cost and their uses. It was business people, working to urgent and high-stakes deadlines, who had such pressing matters to discuss that they could not wait till they reached a landline. It was business people who sat in front of a computer all day, and therefore might reap the benefits of a computer that could send and receive letters. (As for websites, they were primarily for nerds, until it emerged they could be used for shopping and pornography).
The first prominent mobile telephone that incorporated the internet, the BlackBerry, still fit this business-first pattern. Although it had a final act as a preferred accessory of hooligans, the BlackBerry was, in its heyday, a tool of the Very Important businessman, jet-setting to meetings with his Very Important fellows, tip-tapping away at his Very Important e-mails in luxury airport lounges. No one else had so drearily exacting a job as to require them to look at their e-mails when they were not in the office.
The BlackBerry was, in its heyday, a tool of the Very Important businessman.
Meanwhile the mobile telephone had broken containment. It emerged that, if they could afford it, nearly everyone found it convenient to be able to make and take calls wherever they were. More importantly, text-messaging—although initially conceived of as a secondary function—turned out to be (as it remains) a hugely appealing means of exploiting mobile communication. Texting requires none of the niceties of the letter or the telephone call. It also provides a middle way between the often equally unpalatable alternatives of taking and declining a call.
Now that nearly everyone had a mobile telephone, it was only a question of making the provision of internet on mobiles smooth and affordable for the mobile-telephone-cum-internet to become the universal form of portable device. This new device, the “smartphone”, complete with a still / video camera, has proven unspeakably potent. It is far more than a mobile telephone with a camera and an internet connection, or (looking at it the other way), a portable computer that can take calls and pictures. Because it is with us always, because it means we are never away from our networks, or they from us, the smartphone is effectively the creator of a new form of consciousness. Each of us—along with our bodily reality and our own thoughts—holds in our pocket or hand an entire virtual universe, constantly beckoning us away from the world and the people in front of us, and from any dialogue with our own souls or with God.
The smartphone is effectively the creator of a new form of consciousness.
The smartphone means we are never alone with our thoughts, or even with our books, music or pictures. In the voice of both friends and strangers, the smartphone clamours always for us to send and receive digital signals. But the smartphone also means that we are never entirely together: some part of us is torn away from those whose company we are sharing—not because we are partly lost in our inner landscape, but because we must make a conscious effort not to turn away to the screen that offers a million substitutes for having an inner life at all.
St Augustine wrote that the mind of a man or woman, in its perception of and reflection on the world and on itself, was the closest image available to us of the inner life of the divine Trinity. Yet our smartphone-assisted consciousness is forgetting how to see the world and ourselves, in favour of virtual stimuli and simulacra. Might we then be eroding, rather than just our powers of concentration and our peace of mind, something of our inner god-likeness?
