Ah, our glorious smartphones. What would we do without them? How would we send countless text messages to our friends who are in the same room as us? How would we surf the web when we should be listening to our compelling professor explaining the wonderfully exciting world of derivatives? And how would we be able to stalk that cute guy seconds after we meet him at that dorm party? All joking aside, our generation’s obsession with our iPhones has surpassed any cheesy 1980s science-fiction movie could predict. If we spend so much time on this tiny metal contraption, it must say something about ourselves, right?
My iPhone has pretty much never left my side since getting my first one sophomore year in high school. I have had almost every edition due to my totally amazing propensity for breaking the screen a week within getting one. Thankfully, my ability to actually grasp the damn thing and not drop it every second has evolved along with the actual content on my iPhone. In that way, my smartphone seems to mimic and follow who I am as I grow older. So what does this Apple product reveal about my identity? And does the picture the phone paints true to who I actually am?
The most effective step to any major creeping on someone’s phone is to casually check out the variety of apps present. Are there mostly news apps pointing to a culturally literate individual, is there a large volume of game apps to possibly pass the time for someone who does a lot of traveling, or does this person have an obnoxious amount of social networking apps to ensure he or she is able to let everyone know just how adorable his or her niece is? The list goes on and on from what you can uncover from just observing what apps this person possesses. Another interesting personality trait that can be determined from a quick glance is how the apps are arranged. Is there an obvious arrangement and order possibly showing a systematic, maybe even borderline OCD, or is there no rhyme or reason to the apps at all displaying a free spirit owner who might be completely scatter-brained? There are a multitude of assumptions one can make from this simple aspect. My phone seems to have an interesting mix of social media apps, sports update apps, entertainment industry apps, and education apps. The variety shows a large range of interests that might make me either really curious about the world or unable to commit to one such passion. I have several folders that house similar apps, but there are still about 5 or 6 apps that randomly placed with no set position. This shows that I possibly began to file and order my apps, but got lazy halfway through and never had the time nor patience to finish it.
While some of the assumptions people would make about me from my phone would be correct (an ungodly amount of texts means she’s talkative and too lazy to delete texts), others would be altogether wrong (only pictures of cats means she has no friends and will possibly die alone). While the jury is still out on the second part, I actually do have real friends that are not just cute little kittens. Which brings about a real problem to the whole “our identity is our iPhone”: many misconceptions can be born by trying to understand a person by looking through their smartphone. While our cell phones may be our life, our life is not our cell phones. If you actually understood what I just wrote, then bravo! For the rest of you normal people that means we depend on our phones for a multitude of capabilities; it helps us get through the day. But unlike our overly expensive and way too delicate friends, we are more complex than a piece of metal. More than almost all technologies, human beings are filled with beautiful little contradictions and nuances that can barely be understood by other complex humans let alone an artificially intelligent machine. And although Joaquin Phoenix’s indie flick Her tried to tell us differently, machines are not people and therefore not capable of fully capturing the essence of one’s full identity.