We are a Screen-Avid Society.
In an Analogue Age, Pre-Mobile Phone, society only gathered around 2 screens: the one in the corner of the living room, the other in the darkness of the movie theatre. Both hypnotised in their own ways. Both commanded an avid following.
The Digital Age created “Screen Competition” – a convergence of content across a divergence of screen hard-wear – and while the term, "Screen-based Society" has been doing the rounds for a while, it no longer quite cuts it.
Tempus fugit, and Society & Technology have waltzed hand-in-hand into a whole other dance craze.
Personal Screens are becoming The New Dependency. Prevalent is giving way to ubiquitous, will soon give way to universal. Just look around, and look how many are busy looking down at their screens.
Screens. And more screens. They're everywhere.
A "mobile" phone, a phone you carried around with you, was initially a Novelty-of-the-Few. But it didn't take the late-majority long. We all quickly arrived at the party, quickly developed a dependency on a technology we'd never previously needed... because the benefits were so clear. It was hellishly useful to be able to get hold of someone in an instant, whatever they were up to, wherever they were.
All narcotics have to be benefit-based, otherwise they wouldn't be narcotic – and The Mobile Phone was all about Clear Benefit.
Today, the mobile phone has progressed to a Higher Purpose, has become a more ambitious kind of "Life Support" - a label I give quite literally. It genuinely supports the way people live their daily lives.
How well could the majority function without it? How much would people give-up in place of giving up their mobile phone? On the totem pole of daily importance, our mobile phones sit pretty close to the top, maybe even up there above caffeine and chocolate, if push came to shove and something had to go.
And because everyone loves a good Infograph:
Our phones are becoming "all screen", some have grown into tablets, and few remain “just phones”. They're hand-held computers that fit in our pockets, and because they connect us to the digital world, they are the world in our pocket.
Apple is spelling it out to us, just in case spelling out were needed...
When Charles Dunstone launched The Carphone Warehouse (1989), he was looking no further into a future than where a phone-in-your-home was naturally scale-able to a phone-in-your-car.
The business opportunity got kinda bigger than that.
3.6 billion people currently own a mobile phone. 91% of Americans use a mobile phone, 31% of whom currently own a smartphone, and by the end of 2011, more Americans will have smartphones than feature phones. It’s projected Mobile Internet Access will hit 10 billion users by 2020 (Source: Nielsen).
So, from a primordial analogue soup of car phones and cathode tubes, we now have a Screen-Dependent Society where everyone carries one or more Life Devices; an iPad, a Kindle, a smartphone for calling, gaming, Googling, and Facebooking, and that handily is also a camera that stores your music collection. It sometimes sounds like we're living in a time that comes after The Jetsons.
And our wireless, world-wired screens are only going to usurp other “daily dependable”, where One Device can meet a greater number of needs. Our car keys, our credit and debit cards, our boarding passes: all replaceable with a single cellular solution, a solution soon loaded with NFC (Near Field Communication) technology. Everyone's getting to feel a little more like James Bond, equipped with latest gadgets from Q-Branch.
It used to be that our only daily Screen-Fix came from the one in the corner of our living rooms. 3.5 hours a day was the average daily Western diet of TV (a figure that’s now fluttering around 4).
But today, we no longer have to leave our homes and feel screen-bereft. Our screens come with us; have become our crutch, our comfort blanket, our umbilical cord and keyhole on the world.
And shortly, as “augmented reality” starts to find its feet and spread its wings, our screens will redefine how we interact with our physical world. Our screens will provide the looking glass for what we see, how we experience, how we behave with Our Everyday.
Layer a digital graft over the physical world, and the view fundamentally changes. The Synthetic or Virtual World is starting to fold back into the real world, is going start allowing people to self-define their own "real".
“One of the most important technology trends over the next 3-5 years will be the effort to embed the dynamics of networked gaming into everyday life.”
Edward Castranova, Economist
To wonder what's next is indeed to wonder. Prospection is a tricky business... but I'd hazard a guess that The Screen Business will always be good business.
SP.
Footnote:
Check out also: Are Smartphones Taking Over Our Lives?
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