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In outer space, when an object becomes so powerful that it sucks everything nearby into itself, we call it a black hole.
In cyberspace, when a device becomes so powerful that it sucks every electronic function into itself, we call it a BlackBerry.
Over the last couple of years, we've witnessed the consolidation of more and more functions into what used to be called a cell phone. First it was a phone, then a texting device, then a camera, then a game console, then a Web surfer, then a music player. Then it became a reader of physical hyperlinks. Then a reader of 3-D digital maps. Then a universal remote. Today, we call this thing a smartphone. Within three years, we'll be calling it something else. As it absorbs one function after another, it's becoming strong enough to consume the ultimate prey: the minds of its users.
Here's one more job the phone is devouring: GPS.
Jenna Wortham presents the latest trend data in the New York Times:
More than 40 percent of all smartphone owners use their mobile devices to get turn-by-turn directions, according to data from Compete, a Web analytics firm. For iPhone users, the figure is even higher, eclipsing 80 percent. ... Sales of traditional GPS units from companies like TomTom, Garmin and Magellan (a unit of MiTAC International) have fallen sharply recently. During the first quarter, TomTom said it shipped 29 percent fewer GPS units compared with the period in 2008. Garmin said unit sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter compared with the previous year. ... Meanwhile, shipments of smartphones in North America are expected to grow by 25 percent this year, with more than 80 percent of them equipped with GPS, according to ABI Research.
One reason for the exodus from dedicated GPS devices is cost: You can get a smartphone for $100 to $300 instead of spending $177 on a GPS unit. But the main reason is consolidation: Nobody wants to carry two devices—or three, or four, or five—when you can carry one that does all five things.
Some GPS makers, Wortham reports, are responding to this trend by selling GPS as software for smartphones instead of selling it as hardware. Others are adding phone service to their GPS devices. Good luck with that. But the bottom line is that no matter how this fight ends—smartphones with GPS, GPS with smartphones, or add-on GPS software for your smartphone—only one device will remain. Consolidation is inexorable.
What will the smartphone eat next? In no particular order, my money's on credit cards, car keys, flashlights, flash drives, books, television sets, and laptops. Some of these functions are already being absorbed. And one of these days, somebody will figure out how to add a stun gun. Just try not to hit the wrong button.
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Is it rude to focus on your smartphone during meetings?
It's way more than that. It's another sign that the virtual world is overtaking the physical world.
Here are the evolving facts on the ground, so to speak, as presented by Alex Williams in Monday's New York Times:
The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds—and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.
Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors. A few years ago, only "the investment banker types" would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. "Now it's everybody." He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.
It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a conference table—not praying—while others are speaking, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic where they are allowed. "You'll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting," Mr. Reines said.
The Times headlined this article, "At Meetings, It's Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners." But the story is much bigger than manners. It's the ascent of the virtual world as a rival to the physical world. We've talked about this trend before in the context of cell phones and driving. When phone calls draw your eyes off the road, and when electronic messages pull your attention out of business meetings, it's time to think about what's happening to the relationship between your mind and your body. You're drifting out of physical space. Not just you but the millions of others who are doing the same thing.
That point about "the etiquette debate ... tilting in the favor of smartphone use"? That's the virtual world gaining parity and vying for supremacy. That guy who speeds up his presentation when most of his listeners disappear into their BlackBerrys? That's the physical world struggling to keep up. That observation from Clinton's adviser about "half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting"? That's no joke. They really are having a meeting. It just happens to be in the virtual world. If your body is in the room but your brain is offline, you're missing that meeting. You're absent.
The virtual world has many advantages in the fight for your attention. It can connect you to people and places far away. It can tell you almost instantly what you need to know. It lets you flip through incoming messages at your own pace, unlike the boring presentation you're enduring in the physical world. And it lets you communicate privately, even in public. That's what many of those "submeetings" are, an executive tells Williams. They're exchanges of "things that you might not say out loud."
There's the real story: People are migrating from the old world to the new one. That's why you're here, reading and exchanging ideas with people you've never met offline. "Manners" is just the old world's way of protesting this migration. But protestation is weak. The old world has no inherent claim to your attention. It will have to earn it.
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Two days ago, we were talking about how the physical and digital worlds are beginning to converge and blur.
Step 1: physical hyperlinks.
Step 2: the integration of physical perception with 3-D digital maps.
Step 3? I speculated that it might be a change in human perception through external devices, biotechnology, or acculturation. But maybe that's Step 4. Maybe Step 3 is the convergence of the phone with the universal remote.
There's nothing mind-blowing about this idea. But that's the point. In real life, cosmic revolutions unfold incrementally: a device here, a software upgrade there. The New York Times lays out some of the new options:
1. A free application (called Remote) and a gizmo (called Intelliphone) that enable iPhones to control computers.
2. A $100 hardware-software package (called Shadow) that "converts a BlackBerry's Bluetooth transmission into an infrared signal your TV can understand." A similar device lets the BlackBerry control a garage door.
3. A $10 app (called i-Clickr) that uses the iPhone screen to display buttons that will operate a PowerPoint presentation on a nearby PC.
The Times says this is "probably the beginning of the end" for the universal remote, since it relies on buttons, whereas a smartphone screen can provide as many options as you need. But my guess is that a more fundamental dynamic is at work: We want to centralize our power to manipulate the things around us. The universal remote was supposed to do that. But it doesn't, because it can't navigate the digital world the way the smartphone can.
We need to consolidate these two devices. And it's a lot easier to put the remote's abilities in the smartphone than vice versa.
Bye-bye, universal remote. You can't be universal when you don't reach the other universe.
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How do alternate universes materialize, coexist, and converge? Here's one answer: Look at your cell phone.
Two years ago, I saw an article in the New York Times about "physical hyperlinks." Essentially, these are contact nodes between the physical and digital worlds. I can hardly begin to explain them. So I'll let the Times' Louise Story do the talking:
New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows [cell] phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet. In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen. ...
In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and board airplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards. ...
"You've picked up this product, and you don't want to go back to your PC," said Tim Kindberg, a senior researcher at the Bristol, England, lab of Hewlett-Packard. "Or you're outside this building, and you want more information. We call it the ‘physical hyperlink.' "
In much the same way that Web publishing took off because of the ability to link to other people's sites, cellphone technologies linking everyday objects with the Web would reveal the digitally encoded attributes of tangible things on grocery shelves or newsstands.
In this rendering of the nexus between space and cyberspace, the cell phone is the reader. It translates physical objects into their digital incarnations. The operative digital incarnation, as of 2007, was bar codes:
The most promising way to link cellphones with physical objects is a new generation of bar codes: square-shaped mosaics of black and white boxes that can hold much more information than traditional bar codes. The cameras on cellphones scan the codes, and then the codes are translated into videos, music or text on the phone screens. ... Now, as more cellphones come equipped with cameras and the ability to run small computer programs, the codes are beginning to appear on some state drivers' licenses and on some mailing labels ... In Japan, some highway billboards have codes large enough for passing motorists to read them with their phones. Hospitals put them on prescriptions, allowing pharmacies to instantly scan the medical information rather than read it.
So, in a way: cell phone + bar code = wormhole.
That was two years ago. I've been waiting for the next piece of the puzzle. I think this is it: the integration of physical perception with three-dimensional digital maps. Here's the Times' John Markoff:
Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. ... Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now "augment" reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user's surroundings produced by the phone's camera. With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one's surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world. ...
Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, [asks], "How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you're looking at in the physical world?"
Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time.
If I understand this transition correctly, we're no longer talking about two worlds, one physical and one digital, connected at selectively engineered nodes. We're now talking about a wholesale overlap between the two worlds. Every physical object, or at least every object of sufficient size to be mapped, will have a digital incarnation. And you'll be able to alternate smoothly between the two worlds, most conspicuously by using your 3-D digital map to see right through a visual obstruction.
This is how cosmic revolutions unfold in real life: not abruptly or mysteriously, as in science fiction, but incrementally. A device here, a software upgrade there, a synchronization, a multiplication. New technologies, new possibilities, new combinations, new habits. Economics and culture are as crucial to this process as technical innovation.
The next piece of the puzzle may not be a change in either of the two worlds. It may be a change in what is, for now, the ultimate reader: the human being. This could take place through externally worn devices, biotechnology, or acculturation. But one way or another, we'll begin to shift our mental attention and our comfort zone from the physical to the digitally enhanced environment. If you want to see what this kind of mental migration looks like, just glance at all the people around you who are talking on cell phones, lost in invisible worlds, oblivious to their surroundings.
If we're lucky, the next migration will bring our minds back into alignment with our bodies. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In a gesture as simple as holding up your smartphone to see what's around you, we'll begin to inhabit the new world, without leaving the old one.