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Digital Futures Series
Axel Bruns, Are Filter Bubbles Real?
Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, How Green is Your Smartphone?
Milton Mueller, Will the Internet Fragment?
Neil Selwyn, Should Robots Replace Teachers?
Neil Selwyn, Is Technology Good for Education?
How Green is Your Smartphone?
RICHARD MAXWELL AND TOBY MILLER
polity
Copyright © Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller 2020
The right of Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3473-9
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INTRODUCTION
The Economist identified 2019 as “peak smartphone.” The “most successful consumer product in history” had reached four billion of the world’s five and half billion adults. Over 95 percent of Americans owned a cellphone, and smartphones comprised 77 percent of that total. The highest concentration was among educated 19 to 49-year-old city dwellers (Pew Research Center, 2018). South Korea topped the world’s list with 94 percent smartphone ownership, and the trend was similar throughout developed economies, with Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and the UK slowly catching up to US levels (Poushter, Bishop, and Chwe, 2018).
Cultural, social, economic, health, and ecological corollaries of peak smartphone have accompanied this expansion. Umberto Eco reimagines David Lean’s Dr Zhivago (1965) for our own times, recalling: “the tragedy of Zhivago, who after years sees Lara from the tram (remember the final scene of the film?), doesn’t manage to get off in time, and dies. Had they both had a mobile phone, would we have had a happy ending?” (2014, p. viii). The smartphone is a reassuring talisman: we may find ourselves one day on unfamiliar terrain, but can find our way out through its mapping functions. We may wander into a “dodgy” part of town, but can rely on it to communicate our whereabouts to loved ones or the state apparatus (Morley, 2017).
Meanwhile, the companies concerned revel in cell-phone saturation of the world’s ears, eyes, and fingers. Apple says “We believe everyone should be able to do what they love with iPhone.”1 Samsung invites customers to “meet our latest and greatest innovation” – its Galaxy S10.2 Google boasts that the Pixel 3 is “Everything you wish your phone could do.”3 That all sounds rather grand – stylish new phones that give us what we want. Trust Apple, trust Samsung, trust Google. But a 2019 report on the Mobile World Congress announced in a letter to “Dear Visionaries” that the industry was “suffering from a combination of split personality disorder and ADHD” (ABI Research for Visionaries/MWC 19 Barcelona, 2019). That diagnosis derived from the differing interests of two fractions of capital – phone manufacturers versus carriers. And there was no room in this world of visionaries for either party to consider whether their phones were green.
Because the diffusion of these devices has been more rapid than their innovation, sales finally began to diminish in 2018: there is a dwindling number of first-time customers left to corral. But even though improvements have become ever more marginal, the industry can count on 2.8 billion people replacing their phones every two years (“The Maturing,” 2019). Meanwhile, the consumer market is slowly becoming less significant than demand from military, medical, meat, and manufacturing segments of the economy (ABI Research for Visionaries/MWC 19 Barcelona, 2019).
For all that, digital utopians continue to fete the phone’s popularity, reach, and effects. According to Bell Labs, “more than 5 zettabytes of data … pass through the network every year. That is the equivalent of everyone in the world tweeting non-stop for more than 100 years.”4 For Edgar Morin, the instantaneity of phone communication means that our “world is made more and more whole” (1999). In similar vein, Ulrich Beck says the cellphone has altered “sociological categories of time, space, place, proximity and distance” as it “makes those who are absent present, always and everywhere” (2002: 31). It is said that one day the smartphone may even provide material clues to the way we lived:
The phone has much in common with the portable artifacts of a more traditional archaeology, like flint hand-axes or pottery vessels … an object scaled to fit the human world … shaped to fit the hand and fingers, and has action capabilities … orientated towards other parts of the body … (Edgeworth 2010: 143)
But there’s another side to this seeming cornucopia. The World Privacy Forum proposes that we inhabit a One-Way Mirror Society, where power accretes to corporations through the supposedly even-handed tool of interactivity (Dixon, 2010). Former true-believers at Wired magazine see the internet undone by the corporatization of knowledge and the sealed-set model of phone applications (Anderson and Wolff, 2010). Dan Schiller describes the displacement and deracination of modern life as a blend of individuation with mobility. He argues that political-economic arrangements mean that mobile telephony has emerged in a form befitting divided societies (2007).
And, while the gap in mobile-phone ownership between