Digital Having and Digital Have-Notting

On how ownership of a smartphone is now a prerequisite for participating in society

I bought a new iPhone last week, my previous six-year-old model having reached the point where it was time to send it to a farm in upstate New York. (Twenty minutes browsing of Facebook would take its battery from 100% to 33% and leave it in a worryingly hot state).

For me, it was a reasonably quick and painless process, which took about twenty minutes. For the bloke who I was metaphorically queued behind, not so much, which was why I had to wait about ninety odd minutes before I could start my twenty minutes. He and his wife were from immigrants from Somalia, and I say this not because I’m stereotyping but because he was wearing a Somalia sweatshirt and their credit check involved the checking of some kind of immigration service ID and a long, long call to the immigration service.

(And I wasn’t eavesdropping - it’s just that it was all in the open plan main shop area, and thus difficult not to hear. I was actually quite shocked at the way their private details were loudly played out in a public place.)

He was trying to get a new contract with a new phone for his wife. Not an unreasonable thing to be asking for when one is standing in a mobile phone shop. But before they even got to the credit check, we got to the first bit of madness which was they were told that in order to get a new phone plus contract, his wife had to be able to check her email there and then in the shop. It’s apparently a new procedure; to buy a phone they have to email you various documents and you have to read those documents in front of you.

Let’s just restate that in its Kafkaesque, Catch-22 glory:

In order to purchase a device that allows you to receive emails while already on the move, you have to already own a device that allows you to receive emails while already on the move.

Now that wasn’t quite true. In this case, she had a Gmail account, and the store had a fixed tablet that people could use in such cases, but the man and his wife couldn’t recall the password, so there was then a phone call to a relative, which turned into about twenty minutes worth of chat between the woman in the shop who was dealing with them and the relative, where they were trying to do the bit where Google send a text or a automated phone call or something to one device that you then have to input on the second device. Note that it wasn’t good enough for the relative to read the email on the shared family laptop or whatever it was they had. The wife had to read it herself, in the shop.

Eventually, after trying several approaches, they got in, at which point the woman in the shop pointed at the table and told the man that his wife needed to read the email.

“She can’t read or write,” he replied.

I did feel very sorry for him and his wife at this point. They just wanted a phone that she could make phone calls on. (He’d earlier said that they didn’t need any Internet). The woman in the shop was very kind and patient, but it just seemed like one long exercise in public humiliation.

Anyway, I think it was eventually agreed that if the woman pretended to read the email about whatever the hell it was, they could proceed.

They did eventually walk out with a phone. But it’s yet another example of the growing ways in which our society assume that everyone has a smartphone and a smartphone thus becomes a precondition to participating in society.

(And if you’re wondering how it works if you don’t have an email account, I asked about that, and the answer is that they will create one for you. Which is fine, except that if they don’t make sure you can use that account going forward, then there is a risk that they will be sending important communications to a dead email account you can’t read, rather than posting paper copies to you, as they once would have).

And needing a smartphone? It’s everywhere.

My parents can no longer park in the car park in their local town, because you need a smartphone to pay for parking. (There’s an age-discrimination aspect to this. The Apollo 13 astronaut, Jim Lovell, once had to phone his son and ask him to pay for his parking, because he couldn’t figure out the whole “download an app” thing. Let’s be honest, if age can render an Apollo-era astronaut unable to function in modern society, there’s no hope for any of us.)

A couple of weeks ago I went to Indonesia for a work trip, and at the airport in Jakarta I was required to get out my iPhone, scan a QR code, and then fill in my customs declaration on the resulting website. Now I’m sure there would have been an alternative if I didn’t have a smartphone, but there were no instructions given on any alternative. (The very helpful and polite staff were just pointing at the big display with the QR code and the smartphone instructions).

My daughter has just started at secondary school. Most of her homework needs either a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop to complete (a lot of it is on Google Classrooms). Even in primary school, all the maths homework was smartphone based. All communication from both the primary school and the secondary school was via smartphone apps. Without a smartphone you wouldn’t know about trips, photos, open days, or anything. Parents evening is booked via a smartphone app. School meals are paid for by a smartphone app. (On the radio today, a headmistress said that her pupils have their school bus tickets on their smartphones).

Idiots sometimes look at unemployed parents on benefits and angrily ask why they have a smartphone. Really? How they hell else are their kids supposed to do their homework? How the hell else are they supposed to know if PE is on different days this week? How the hell else are they supposed to book parents evening? And come to that, since a smartphone is the preferred / primary way to claim Universal Credit, how the hell are they supposed to get the benefits you’re saying they shouldn’t spend on a smartphone?

More and more, it’s just assumed that you both have a smartphone and are digitally savvy, and if you don’t and aren’t, then more and more of society will be closed off from you.

And we’ve now got to the final evolution of this attitude. The people who sell you smartphones assume that you already own a smartphone.

I weep.