Assignment Six: My Ideal Smart Phone (Katie Dreier)

I will admit I do love my blackberry. I don’t go anywhere without it. It keeps me up to date with a New York Times news feed, dowloads all of my e-mail, and keeps me in touch with friends and family. However, my phone can sometimes hinder my busy life. I am in the habit of turning my ringer on and off for each of my classes and meetings throughout the day. Unfortunately, the mere difference between loud and vibrate is not enough to help me determine how important a certain message or call is.

Anyone with a truly social life knows you have to be flexible. A schedule can change at any moment and interruptions can arise. I need my phone to know when these moments happen so it doesn’t bother me at the wrong time. I also need it to be able to determine which messages or calls I absolutely need to know about, no matter what I’m doing at the time. Acerman highlights the biggest downfall to technology when he admits, “technical mechanisms lack the flexibility required by social life” (180). A secretary, for example, knows when you are on the phone and shouldn’t be bothered. They can also determine how important a certain call from your spouse may be, and whether or not to interrupt you. This is possible because “people handle the details of interactions with considerable agility” (Acerman 181). Here is where the great social-technical gap exists in the realm of a cell phone, as technology cannot yet accommodate for the social agility that a secretary can provide. In reference to “the great divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technicaly,” I need my phone to adapt to the social capabilities of a secretary. (Acerrman 180).

Because “the details of interaction matter,” a smart phone should have a social function that recognizes not only whom I’m with, but also what I’m doing. It should have an inference function that understands each message or call and determines how important the message is to me at that time. Alerts would be altered depending on these characteristics. My ideal smart phone would understand “social activity” and be both “fluid and nuanced” (181). Simply put, “people prefer to know who else is present in a shared space and they use this awareness to guide their work” (183). It is these inherently subconscious actions that if aquired would bridge a cell phone’s social-technological gaps by providing a technology that can act more in-sync with a person’s every needs.