I have a love-hate relationship with my cell phone. There are times when I think about how a world without it is incomprehensible, and there are other times when I want to throw it into a gorge because it’s annoying me so much. I generally use my phone for two major functions, text messaging and regular phone calls, thankfully I don’t have a blackberry, because the addition of email and gchat would be way too much for me to handle. I find that what I find most frustrating is that people often call me when I would rather them text message me (when I’m at Olin subject the glaring eyes of the shushing librarians) and people text message me when I would much rather them call me (when I’m walking to class and almost falling flat on my face because I’m trying to text back at the same time).
My ideal smart phone would have some sort of capability to notify the contacter what mode I was in--text message receiving, call receiving, or neither. One obvious social technical gap that I could see arising would occur with roles. For instance, if a potential employer was calling me, I wouldn’t dare to have my phone suggest that he would be better off text messaging me. We could attempt to solve this problem by entering settings for each contact in your phonebook that would allow the feature to affect different people differently. However, what could we then do about numbers that aren’t already stored in your phone book?
Another gap arises with ambiguity. I know that if my best friend had this feature enabled and her phone suggested that I text message her but I really didn’t feel like expending that much effort I might just try calling anyway. It’s sort of how I consider the “busy” setting on gchat no different than the “available” one for my close friends. We could try to breech this gap by making the setting mandatory, but then it becomes an issue when you have to deal with emergency cases. I suppose that another idea would be to allow and emergency override, but there’s still ambiguity as to what constitutes an “emergency.” In general I think a smart phone can only take you so far, and possibly not much further than efficient use of the ignore button that already exists on the side of the phone can.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Your idea for outgoing notifications notifying callers of your status is an interesting one, since it not only involves your phone, but others' phones, since they have to receive and process the message. Though not socio-technical as much as it is just a problem on the technical side, all phones would therefore have to readjust to this new standard of being able to send and receive this piece of information before the call is being connected. The socio-technical implication is: this implies a constant stream of information between your phone and everyone who has your number, and in that case, you might not want everyone who has your number to know (say, it's some stranger who has your number you don't know about, or a stalker who looked it up.) You wouldn't want that person to know anything about you, let alone your status.
ReplyDelete