Smartphone:
The Smartphone does more than just allows you to communicate with other people. According to the Back 150 timeline website, (Imagining the Internet: Back 150 Timeline) the phone's purpose was to "bring people closer together, decreasing loneliness and building new communities;” The smart phone takes this a step beyond, by allowing communication to also take place through emails, using wireless internet connections. Cassavoy (2010) states, "a smartphone is a device that lets you make telephone calls, but also adds in features that you might find on a personal digital assistant or a computer--such as the ability to send and receive e-mail and edit Office documents, for example."
This technology replaces the cell phone and ultimately the telephone itself. The smartphone rekindles a cluster past technologies. The telegraph and the telegram, were important ways to communicate with people from great distances. I would think that the French would feel that pigeons sending messages would be an important past communication that should be included in this cluster too! The lost art of letter writing would be another technology that the smartphone replaces with its email application. Finally, the keyboard on the smartphone is a small replica of the typewriter.
In the future, the smartphone could continue with all the smartphone applications plus word processing and multimedia project applications, like PowerPoint, video projects, and word processing. This technology will be so sophisticated that one would not even have to type, but simply speak and the future pda will create the projects and do all the typing!
Cassavoy, L. (n.d.). What makes a Smartphone smart? Retrieved June 28, 2010, from About.com: http://cellphones.about.com/od/smartphonebasics/a/what_is_smart.htm
Cassovoy, L. (2010). Before You Buy: Which Operating System Works for Your Smartphone? Retrieved June 28, 2010, from About.com: http://cellphones.about.com/od/smartphonebasics/bb/palm_or_windows.htm
Cha, B. (2010, June 24). Cnet reviews: Best Smartphones. Retrieved June 29, 2010, from http://reviews.cnet.com/best-smartphones/
Imagining the Internet: Back 150 Timeline. (n.d.). Retrieved June 28, 2010, from Elon University/Pew Internet: http://www.elon.edu/docs/e-web/predictions/back150years.pdf
Telegram. (n.d.). Retrieved June 29, 2010, from Ask Image Search: http://www.ecommcode.com/hoover/hooveronline/hoover_dam/politics/thumb/046tn.gif
Telegraph. (n.d.). Retrieved June 29, 2010, from American Inventors and Inventions: http://www.150.si.edu/150trav/remember/r819.htm
Typewritter. (n.d.). Retrieved June 29, 2010, from Ask.com Image Search: http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b13/tonightwedance1/typewritter.jpg
Great post Regina. With the new Smart phones, do you think they will be of high cost and easily adopted by the people? The many components will do away with the laptop.
ReplyDeleteI seen on tv how people were camping outside just to get the Iphone 4, Crazy. The phone will be available soon for everyone. I guess it is good to say you had it first. I look at the Ipad and wondered what if they made that into a huge phone? That will start the advanced smart phone transition.
Nikisha
I enjoyed reading your interpretation of your tetrad, Regina. I, too, had thought about the telegraph. Can you imagine waiting for a telegram for an important message? Today we receive long-distance communications almost instantaneously, but not so long ago we had to wait for the information to be hand delivered by a messenger. I wonder if bike messengers and even the postal service will soon be made obsolete. Amazing!
ReplyDeleteThe term 'reversal' is certainly misleading! Perhaps I am interpreting this incorrectly, but I understand that reversal doesn't mean return to the past, instead it refers to what the technology will become in the future. According to Thornburg (2008), reversal occurs when "...the technology sets the stage for its own replacement" (p. 2.). So in other words, reversal leads to what you predict the smartphone will become in the future. We would use the retrieval section to look at the past. For instance, if we had chosen a typewriter as the subject of our tetrad, we could have placed 'computer' in the reverses quadrant and 'printing press' in the retrieval section. Confusing, huh?
I think we all came up with some of the same elements in our tetrads. I do agree with Anne about retrieval. Do you think we could go all the way back to tribal drums and smoke signals as they were forms of communicating wirelessly? I do wonder how the smart phone will evolve and if if can do much more. This evening as I tried to get my laptop to connect to the hotel wifi, I finally used my iPad and realized that smart phones can't get much bigger as their size is one of the attractions. Technology is just amazing.
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