Control
On the one hand cell phones are arguably the most personal computers since the invention of Personal Computers: most people carry one around every day and use it multiple hours a day. On the other hand cell phones are the least user-controllable devices: no one has administrative access to theirphone, except the companies that sell it. This means that they can do anything with your device:
- they can remotely install programs on it
- they can remotely uninstall programs on it
- they can have access to files on them
- they can listen to your conversations
Is it really your device?
Obsolescence
Having no control over your device has many potential risks, which I partially tried to show in the previous section, but another consequence of it is that people use technology knowing nothing about it. Today everybody owns a personal computing device, even my grandmother owns a phone, this means that companies can very easily design their devices, and most importantly the software that runs on them, so that after a fixed amount of time trivial computations take longer and longer to complete. Until the user "realises" that it's time to buy a new device. If my grandmother's phone suddenly slows down after an "update" (assuming that she knows what an update is) she'll probably think that her phone is too old and a new one would run as quickly as she is accustomed to; I'm sure that she won't think that the problem could be at the software level (it could be, we can't know because no one has access to the source code of most of the programs that run on mobile devices, no matter how much you know about the subject the best you can do is guess). Given that my website is hosted on an Acer KAV10 from 2008 (UPDATE 10/11/2021: the website is now hosted on a Raspberry Pi Zero) I'd guess that software is the problem: her two-year-old phone is probably more capable than this web server no matter how old she's led to think it is.
Addiction
As I said cell phones are the most personal computers, such easy access to technology and all its power can be really useful and does save a lot of time and trouble sometimes, but it has a cost (other than your privacy). Being constantly "connected", stimulated and having such an easy access to the web at all times can be addictive. Some research is being done on this, here are a few references:
- phantom vibrations (ever felt like your phone was vibrating but it wasn't?)
- fear of going without a phone
- cell addiction and psychological and physiological health in adolescents
Other than psychological and physiological addictions due to the use of mobile phones there are also lots of apps (programs) that induce addiction, and having constant access to them can worsen the situation.
For example most mobile games are engineered to be addictive, as explained in the first part of this webpage. Another example of addictive programs are Social Media sites, they have all adopted the same scheme today: an infinitely scrolling home page full of ads and non-informative content. Scrolling for hours a day becomes automatic, it feels very fulfilling: all the content seems very important and interesting, even though most of it are ads and videos of cats playing the piano. Other than addiction social media have a lot of downsides and almost no positives, but that's for another time (if you are interested you can watch this nice video we all know nobody reads anymore).
More resources on this and related topics here
