This phone, the Sidekick III from T-Mobile, symbolizes what it means to be a mobile user; this device allows for unlimited connectivity to your buddy list via AOL Instant Messenger and the ability to text message instantly and seamlessly. This device is very popular because it utilizes a program such as AOL Instant Messenger, typically reserve to use on computers, and transplanting it onto a phone, creating the ultimate mobile device and allowing unlimited connectivity to your friends. This phone has been wildly popular since its inception, particularly among the 16-24 age demographic where being connected is viewed as an important element to ones own life.
However, although one may see this as being beneficial, there are pitfalls to this technology. How connected is too connected? Is being seamlessly connected to your friends a vital feature that one cannot live without? Has our sense of mobility changed from being able to be reached to being seamlessly connected? This device makes users to being prisoners of instant connectivity, thus in turn creating a sense of disability to one’s own self-identity.
I think what is revolutionary about this device is because unlike mobile phones, the Sidekick allows for instant connectivity. What I mean is that for mobile phones, you can chose to ignore a phone call, allowing some sense of separation, whereas in a Sidekick, because you are always connected, anybody can contact you at any time with a text message. For example, I’ve seen users of the Sidekick text in inappropriate places such as Church. As I witness that, I thought to myself, “Has our life come to the point where we cannot even hold off talking to our friends for one hour, even for Church?”
I have owned a Sidekick 3, and although it was very useful, I ironically felt restricted in being seamlessly connected to whoever wanted to talk to me, thus losing my only sense of seclusion from the outside world.
2 comments:
This is a well-written and contemplative post. I like how you've taken up the mobile phone questions, which are vexing ones all around. The idea of 'connectivity' is a really complex notion, and definitely needs to be critiqued. You give your reader some effective points of entry for thinking about these things.
This post raises a lot of points. How free and mobile are we with a Sidekick 3, or any
“smart phone?” Like Sam says, one can become restricted by the fact that there is no sense of privacy since one is always connected to the Internet or AOL Instant Messenger. A device that is supposed to give us more freedom and mobility in fact restricts us from them. Since we now have this unlimited connectivity, we are almost put into a new world where the medium is completely digital. I start to think about how this brings us a step closer to something similar to the Matrix where the imaginative, or digital, becomes reality for us. So much can be done digitally today including paying taxes, grocery shopping, taking traffic school, and even taking college courses. The Internet makes every day errands so easy that our lives have become somewhat digital. We even live separate lives within a digital world with Myspace and Facebook. These profiles allow us to be whomever we want and regulate what people see us as. When do we draw the line of what is digital and what is real then? Matchmaking sites advertise letting someone else see the real you, but how real is someone by reading a digital profile on them? Plus, by communicating through text messages, our language seems to change. It is easier to say something to someone through a computer screen because we do not have to look at their face and their expression when we say it. Our opinion is just said and that’s that. We do not have to confront someone physically so therefore we are not afraid to censor ourselves as much as if we were speaking in person. The Sidekick 3, along with other phones such as the iPhone and LG Vu are all instruments we use to put ourselves into our self-made digital world where reality gets a spin and censorship becomes lax. We start to become confined in our digital world offering less mobility because we become unlimitedly connected to the rest of the people in the digital world.
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