The smartphone generation

Now is undeniably the smartphone generation. Before Soudelor, folks walked the lagoon pathway on Saipan’s famed sunset with a smartphone, either clicking in the scene or texting a message to someone. Former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw made the phrase “the greatest generation” popular. That was his tribute to the 1920s-born group that fought WWII just because “it was right.” Post-WWII generation was dubbed either as self-indulgent or lost.

Ernest Hemingway popularized the term “lost generation” much earlier. With names like T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Isadora Duncan, Franz Kafka, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland, to name some, the generation included a productive stew. Their art diverged or was “lost” from the norm of Europe.

The “lost generation” fought WWI, and the “greatest generation” dug into Normandy’s WWII while others marched into Iwo Jima; American casualties outnumbered the determined “fight ’til death” defending soldiers on the Volcano Islands, a geological extension of the Northern Marianas. Less than 300 of the 22,000 Nihon defenders survived, and Mt. Suribachi provided an iconic photo of U.S. grunts, now a monument in D.C. at Arlington cemetery.

Since the “Earthrise” of the ’60s, I looked at the denizens of a planet as contained in one terrain, of humans evolving only in the last 40,000 years in a landscape that has been around more than four billion earth revolutions around the sun, in a lunar count that is definitely almost 160 billion rotations, but as JFK intoned, “There are no immigrants on Planet Earth.” Its dejado operating image has been in buying into the Malthusian notion that population will always outgrow production, and therefore “the poor will always be with us.” Evolution decreed that there is not enough food to go around, and social Darwinism had the Indo-Aryans claiming racial superiority.

The designation of “greatest” or “lost” does not help much other than praise or condemn ancestors. It is now 2015. There is no quarrel over the “smartphone generation” of the ubiquitous handy gizmo, if the crowd at the IT&E on Pale Arnold Road is any gauge, preferably the iPhone that the youth in my Beijing train last month brandished openly to show they could afford one. The sleek accessory determining behavior invites scrutiny. The smartphone has become “lord” rather than “servant,” outsmarting users.

A brother-in-law commented that the reality of smartphone is simple yet effective—it makes users “appear busy, preoccupied, engaging eyesight and developing hearing as well fingering strokes. To be able to concentrate for a few minutes focused on one specific object only—rather than minding other people business, or on what is immediately going on around the world”—is valued. It fascinates many to understand what other people see and hear filtered through this small device, with family and friends near and far.

Our thoughts wander into the naming of a “smartphone” generation sans ethnic or national boundaries. All around the world, the smartphone is a popular commodity for its convenient utility to connect people. GE flourished with the light bulb, GM and Ford on the mass manufactured motor vehicle. Apple is at the heap of its game with the iPhone.

Apple reaps profits from its ventures, with Google, Samsung, Microsoft, LG, Yahoo, Facebook, Weibu, Alibaba, et al, not too far behind. Jobs and Wozniak popularized the personal computer but reached a peak with the iPhone, now venturing into the iCloud to offer complex media service. Regardless, it will not budge on its right to smartphone! (In case you missed it, I just used the word as a verb!)

My eldest daughter took a day off while I visited her family last year in the outskirt of Chicago, and with her eldest, we spent a day together (2014) on the Windy City’s water canal by the Loop on her smartphone. She just smartphoned it all over the place, using it in place of a credit card. I felt like a dinosaur.

I interviewed for a local high school to teach World Geography and World History more than a month ago. I commented how I needed to catch up with technology that HS students play, noticing the boxes of game players on the floor of the interview room.

We live in a time of computerized smartwatches and light-efficient SmartGlasses, and what were, heretofore, experimental uses of new technologies are now common gadgets used in classrooms.

But like any technological innovation, the human interface still predominates and we have yet to surrender the option to decide ahead of the automated androids. While not as pliant of mind as the primary, elementary and high school students who soak up the latest gadgets as fast as they appear, to innovate and create remains the challenge on my lap, and in the sunset of my years, I am up against a game test should I chance on getting back to PSS to teach. I’ll learn.

I am lining up for my offspring’s discard. I join the smartphone generation this year.