A prison without walls: The smartphone and the pendulum

Like Poe's, this is a story of true terror and true error. Both form relevant themes through which we should address the need to access the practical world through digital information

Whether you believe it or not, some think that cellular phone technology emits enough radiation to cause brain cancers within the immediate vicinity of the ear used by the cell phone operator.

Whether you believe it or not scientists attribute the carcinogenic and tumor-causing effects of radiation to its ionizing effect upon the atomic make-up of organisms near its source.

Cellular phones emit radiation in the form of electromagnetic waves used by the phone to communicate with cellular towers. Smartphones ferry user information in the form of clicks, swipes, voices, choices, or text entered to those towers so that it may ultimately reach and receive responses from a virtualized space visualized on the smartphone screen representing a target computer, webpage, phone, or cloud process somewhere else in the world. The electromagnetic waves emitted by cellular phones is the connection that researchers draw between cellular phone use and instances of head and brain cancers in users. The use of smartphones exposes users to a type of radio frequency radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum. Major regulatory and health bodies deny that it has ionizing potential but some of them place a caveat upon cellular phone use by suggesting that users limit head exposure. That's a principle of moderation akin to saying, "Yes, fire is dangerous but can be used safely; here's how." The analogy simplifies the relationship too much. Most fire we can see. Radiation we cannot.

The connection between cellular phone usage and brain cancer rests unreliably upon the habits of cellular phone users. If developing cancer from the radiation emitted by cellular phones requires pressing the phone to the side of the head for hours a day for years at a time then the blame teeters between the device manufacturers 'prescribed uses' for their products and owners deviating from those prescriptions. The behavioral link between overuse (in whatever form that may take) and the thing overused (natural or human made) forms one tier of morality. And that moral is moderation. Moderation is observed practically in order to avoid being poisoned by the overconsumption of something. That notion transcends new communication technologies and rightly so. Technologies cannot reframe relationships and reality to such an extent that morality no longer applies to them. Therefore, we can discount neither the manufacturers' complicity in offering new products as opportunities to break a moral or the users of new products who do. Morals are ultimately personal as are the decisions made and their judgment. Therefore, the decision to use a device with enough power to expose a user to harmful radiation is the pendulum, which swings with the user's whims. But which way does the pendulum swing? In one direction we use the smartphone in a way that harms us physically. But we're not definitively sure if it really is harmful in the way that we think.  In another direction we remain below a threshold for any risk of being physically harmed by keeping the cellular phone away from our heads. But the pendulum swings in other, conceptually different ways. Let's take a look at them.

The larger issue about cell phone radiation rests upon the power of a cellular phone and to what ends that power is put, either by us or by those who control the tethers that this phone places upon the lives we live contingent to smart phone use. To simplify my point, today's smartphones represent surplus power: surplus computing power, surplus power consumption, and surplus power to distract us. We have to remind ourselves of this context. Each of us is condemned, by practical necessity, to carry around a fully capable microprocessor with a view screen, touch sensitive interface, a mechanical eye and ear to record events, and powerful enough communication capabilities to remain in unbroken contact with a global cellular network that stretches the globe and dots the sky above. That is the big machine behind this smart little device. The cellular phone is the prodigal son of Cold War military, espionage, and spy technology. It is an agglomeration of technologies, network platforms, and standard uses, some of which the spooks inaugurated into practice and others which existed only in their wet dreams. Sure, some of the features are fun, and yes, the phone expands the opportunity for certain activities to occur expressly because the phone has capabilities to facilitate the occurrence of those activities. For example, a smartphone can access the internet and its search capabilities, which enable a user, with only the name of a place, to chart out a way to reach it. It can also play music or allow you to substantiate, by photo or video, your experiences. But the smartphone and its capabilities is only an interface for the technological amber of our contemporaneous online culture. Some call this the web. The web is both the technology for interfacing with the the internet and the extensive digital content of online communication. The cellular- or smart-phone provides access to it and users continually access it and feed it. Communicated ideas, experiences, co-presence, affiliation, and all manner of other relational human symbolically mediated activity, which has probably motivated contributions to the content of known and practiced human activity for eons are now being rehashed, edited, and re-experienced as ways of being for others to follow, try, or respond to. All of this occurs in a quasi-public phantasmagoria of numerical rankings of subscribers, likes, views--a mathematical substantiation of fame, aura, self-importance, which smuggles into human affairs the appearance of objectivity and by doing so raises the stakes artificially for those participating in these multimedia, multimodal, online fora. Engaging in computer mediated communication, using the mode described above does not determine the method or the outcome. While modes of existence might facilitate their perpetuation, the 'free will' of humans explains how changes can and will occur over time and not simply due to necessity but also to the vagaries of human interaction. When we make connections like these we are, as well, artificially placing knots in the vast and complex tapestry of human symbolic existence as a matter of course on our way to making a point. Here's mine.

We are condemned by an increasingly virtualized, online, mobile society to assume a digital avatar as a matter of course: to being hired, to finding a mate, to making and keeping far-flung friends, and finally, in essence, to be. To be now, is to be online. But what makes being online so easy or so interesting? Well, because its sheer scope, the continuous and ever-present access to interactive stimulation, the benefits flatly available on a screen that don't exist in the immediate vicinity of a user otherwise. Simply because online represents a great wish being fulfilled. Wherever you want to go, it takes you. Whatever you want to be, it allows. It's as if we humans are merely shells for a nervous system, which is itself a parasite trapped in those shells. Early cultures called this a soul. Neuroscientists have sexier names for this phenomenon. Those who study symbol use as a uniquely human phenomenon recognize that when you are given a name, you can become a word in that deep stream, and this provides a means for the virtualization of a self-identity. And now, online serves as that murky aquarium resting on the pedestal where the parasite crawls out to be 'at home.' So yes, the online world fulfills a dream of the soul, a wish of the self, a tropism of the neuroscientifically defined brain area. And to put it simply, if we find value in being there, we go there, and for as long as it provides us with acceptable value we will continue to go there.

But that larger point I wanted to make is this. In this pyramidal age of machines the makers of the machines follow innovation curves that lead toward more: more features, more power, more, more, more. What some of us are carrying around is perhaps more power than we really need. It is more power than we need if we're to believe that it produces ionizing radiation at levels enough to alter the nuclear material of our body's cells. But to what does all this surplus power go?

We can think about this for some time. Some of that power goes to the interface and the values that bigger screens, more storage, better sound, and better color bring to the user. We can also look upon this as a better hole through which to peer into this dreamscape of wish fulfillment that occurs online. And this is one slave hook enabled through surplus power. As Steve Jobs noted at the dawn of the consumer computer revolution, the surplus computing power to which his company had access allowed it to make a computer with a more readily accessible interface to expand participation in computing and to revolutionize how we interacted with computers. The child of this moment was the mouse-navigable graphical user interface. And Jobs' last child was the prototype for social control into the twenty-first century: the smart phone that you cannot live without. As we follow this innovation curve toward more computing power into the future the power of these devices and their ubiquity will make them an absolute necessity. At this point, the question of the volitional requirements to participation will disappear. But volition was never really the bigger issue here, it's a more absolute description of freedom. And here's the trick.

Freedom of movement will remain, more or less, without impediments. But we are already beginning to see the parasite slip out of its fleshy cuticle. Thinking is beginning to move from us to the device in our palm, or on our lap, or on our desk. And that microprocessor with multimedia interface will serve as the central hub in a person's networked existence without which that person will no longer be able to live in the world, first, enabled by the device, and finally, necessitated by it. So a greater existential threat exists outside of our close and frenzied interactions with touch-sensitive scrolling interfaces of imagery, sound, video, and text--having an online experience adjusted to shape our understanding of reality. Online is becoming the new inside and the resting place for our one constant and essential companion, our decision making self, now supplanted as a search query carrying out in real time what people once did in thought. And the vast artificial intelligence behind connecting queries to search hits and the spell checking and suggesting algorithms all serve to level up a certain population of smartphone users while potentially leveling down others to a standard presumptively imposed by the design of the interface that is seen and the software code that makes the millions of microdecisions to turn your query into your wish fulfilled.

But the trickier question is when all that power will be used to control us more completely. The glib answer is when there's enough power. The processing power in the smartphone need not do more other than standardize our existence as an identity, a location, and a history all substantiated as digital information. And that's all it needs to do. The qualification to the answer, 'when there's enough power' would be when 'we've reached a critical mass of a type of user.' That user is the pliable meat seen through the phone's camera's eye held at selfie stick length away. That user decided to purchase a smartphone, make small, fidgety kinds of choices to use this phone all the time, and lose most other abilities to decide that the smartphone's search query could not provide through a search 'hit.' At the other end of search is a Valhalla, a wish fulfilled, a behavior-enforcing reward, and through these termite trails of search and return we create a user-customized experience. To the extent that we never turn this experience off we cede to its reality, and in doing so we become a more predictable, and predictably controlled smartphone user. The processing power of our smartphones, in the long run, is going to facilitate greater control over our choices and by dint the activities that characterize our existence. Our prison becomes the protean datascape, which encapsulates our interaction with practically acquired information for understanding and living our lives.