Do you own a smartphone or is it the case that your smartphone owns you?

There are more mobile subscriptions than there are people in Malta. According to the Malta Communications Authority, there were 736,214 in June 2023.

A recently released MISCO study ties the omnipresence of the smartphone to the ubiquity of the internet. Over 90 per cent of the Maltese use the internet daily and almost all of them have a smartphone. Almost all those in the 25-44 age cohort use a smartphone and 80 per cent of the over 55s do the same.

Probably, your answer to the first part of my question is a ‘yes’. But of greater importance is your answer to the second part of my question: is your smartphone

unknowingly changing you so much that it could be said that it owns you?

I declare my bias. I own a smartphone. I cannot imagine living without one. If, while driving for work, I notice that I left my smartphone at home, I readily go back to collect it.

Considering the enormous use of smartphones, I do not think I am the only one to do just that.

As I wrote in various publications, we are the first generation of humans that concurrently live in two real spaces: the virtual and the physical. Our generation is conscious of how the physical environment we live in moulds us.

In more sense than one, our physical environment shapes us and makes us resemble its characteristics. But we are not conscious enough of the radical impact that the virtual or cybernetic environment we live in has on us.

It is a mistake to think of the smartphone or any other means of communication just as another item that we carry or use, without realising that these technologies change us radically.

Every instrument of communication technology does start up as a technology but it, willy-nilly, becomes an economy and a culture. Digital-based communication technologies changed the capitalist economic system so much so that, today, we speak of surveillance capitalism and data capitalism.

Our culture, which includes our way of life and value system, has been radically changed. We, individually and collectively as a society, adopt the characteristics of the communication technology we use and, consequently, morph into its image and likeness.

The smartphone is the specimen par excellence of communication technology. It combines into one gadget, which we carry with us, all the traditional communication technologies: television, radio, newspapers, the cinema and magazines. It does more. It gives us access to the internet and to social media platforms (over 90 per cent use Facebook and WhatsApp daily – MISCO). It provides us with video and still cameras, a facility which helped create the selfie generation.

Our smartphone changed the way we have access to banks, libraries, restaurants, games, health apps, airline tickets, hotels...

The list is endless.

Besides, all these enterprises adapted their websites to the way things look and read on smartphones, as we generally only access services or products through our smartphone.

There are more mobile subscriptions than there are people in Malta- Fr Joe Borg

The smartphone embeds us in the virtual environment and makes it easily available. We carry this easy access in our pockets.

This use is so pervasive that we do not go online but almost live online.

Floridi came up with the term ‘onlife’ to describe this new style of our existence. The term ‘onlife’ is used to accentuate the fact that the boundaries between life offline and life online have been obfuscated.

Life online is increasingly affecting our self-perception, our mutual interactions, our perception of reality and our interactions with reality. Online interactions, including self-presentation and self-disclosure, become spaces for negotiating identity, mostly for adolescents.

More than any other communication technology, the smartphone collapsed space. Decades ago, people used to wonder at stories of saints who were rumoured to be at two places at once. Today, we can bilocate with immense ease. It takes just click on a link through our smartphone.

The smartphone created in us the ‘need’ to be in continuous communication with each other.

Family members and close friends download apps on their smartphones informing each other where they are at any given point in time. This can be beneficial when caring relations exist.

However, others, whom we do not particularly like, are thereby enabled to be in constant communication with us. This does have negative effects such as the existence of cyberbullies and keyboard warriors.

While in Orwell’s 1984, a tyrannical system imposed on the population eradicated privacy, today, it has been eliminated by a gadget we gladly use and pay good money to own. Then we fool ourselves by enacting data protection laws to give us the illusion of privacy.

Our smartphones provide us with constant contact with what is happening in the rest of the world. News notifications bombard us. Fine if our sources are credible and serious. But if our sources consist of unverified stories on Facebook or Tik Tok or sites that feast on clickbaits, we are not really being informed. Deep fakes add to the dark irony that, in the age of instant communication, the only thing which is certain is that we cannot be certain of anything we watch or read. Even the British Royal family, the paragon of how to be prim and proper, imitated the hoi polloi and regaled us manipulated photos.

McLuhan’s famous aphorism that “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us” has never been as true as it is today. Those who are not conscious of all strengths and perils of smartphones and the rest of communication technology access them to their own peril. These persons do not own smartphones but are owned by them.