1. Introduction & Background

“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” – Marshall McLuhan (The medium is the message, 1964)

McLuhan believed that the introduction of new technologies into a society has a determining effect on the organisation of that society, the perceptions of its members, and the way in which knowledge and information are stored and shared. This paper is an effort to explore the personal and social consequences of the smartphone, a new technology that emerged in the last decade, following the framework of McLuhan’s way to analyse media. how we shape our tools and the way they shape us

Who was McLuhan? Key terms and ideas Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980) was a Canadian philosopher and a revolutionary thinker, who fundamentally changed perceptions of media, communications, and technology. He recognised the technological and medial developments of the twentieth century as revolutions, comparable to the invention of the print press in the fifteenth century. Advancing his ideas, he published various works – among the most famous are The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium is the Massage (1967) – which established him as an important and often controversial figure in the field of communication (Library and Archives Canada, 2007). McLuhan is famous for aphorisms like “the medium is the message” or “the medium is the massage”, as well as for coining the term “the global village”, and advancing the ideas of “hot and cold media” and “media as extensions of man”. The expression “the medium is the message” is based on McLuhan’s idea that not the content of a medium, but its characteristics have an effect on the society in which it is active. Media exert these effects by reshaping the ways in which individuals, societies and cultures perceive and understand their environments. McLuhan paid particular attention to the effects of media on our senses, since he believed that media affect us by manipulating the ratio of our senses. Based on this, he also formulated the ideas of “hot media” which are media that are high in definition and do not ask high participation of the audience, e.g. film, and “cool” media which ask more participation due to lower definition, like newspapers, for example (Library and Archives Canada, 2007; McLuhan, 1964; World’s Fair Design, 2009). Furthermore, McLuhan was a visionary; many say that he predicted the internet thirty years before it was actually introduced. He used the term “global village” to describe his observation that an electronic nervous system was rapidly integrating the world, and this metaphor can be seen as an appropriate description of our present media age. Calling it an “electronic nervous system” derives from McLuhan treating technologies and artefacts as extensions of our bodies and minds. (Agethen, n.d.; Andrews, 1995; Living Internet, 2000; McLuhan, 1964). It is remarkable that he advocated these ideas in the early 1960s, when television was still in the early stages of its development and the commercial use of personal computers and internet was some decades in the future. At a later stage of his life, McLuhan developed a scientific model summing up his ideas, the tetrad. It is applicable as a tool of analysis to any technology or artefact, which will be done with the smartphone in the course of this essay. Creating tetrads of our everyday technologies and studying the tools we use to organise our daily lives can increase awareness of our environment and give a better understanding of how we shape our tools and the way they shape us (another important idea of McLuhan) (Kappelmann, 2001; Kornberger, 2011).

What is a smartphone? Definition and usage An official definition of the term smartphone does not exist, but in the context of this essay, a smartphone is understood as a mobile phone that next to normal telephony services (calling and texting) is able to perform similar functions as a computer, capable of running all kinds of applications (“apps”) as well as providing internet access. A smartphone typically has a relatively large screen (if larger than five inches it is often called a “phablet”), one or two (video-)cameras, and is either operated by tipping with the fingers on a high-resolution touchscreen or by using a miniature keyboard. Around two billion people in the world use a smartphone (Statista, 2016) and the number is growing steadily as it is the fastest growing segment in the mobile device market (Gigaom, 2013). Especially in Western countries, the penetration of smartphones among mobile phone users is high, between 40% (e.g. France, USA) to 50% (e.g. UK, Spain) (MobiThinking, 2013), but other countries are catching up. Smartphone owners use it for various purposes; the most common usages are browsing the internet or using an application, messaging and e-mailing, seeking entertainment and social networking, as well as accessing news and information (data apply to the USA, Europe, and Japan) (MobiThinking, 2013). In line with the spread of the smartphone, other mobile and wearable computing devices have become popular. Tablet computers have similar functions as smartphones but usually have a screen larger than nine inch and are normally not intended for telephony services. Among the most popular wearable devices are accessories (e.g. watches, glasses) incorporating technology such as activity trackers, touchscreens, and applications. The increasing spread of such devices is shaping a “culture of wearables” which add to the use of smartphones and create augmented reality (as discussed later). Around 90% of smartphone owners use their smartphone throughout the day (Go-Gulf, 2012) and for many users, it has become such an inherent part of their daily routines that they cannot imagine life without a smartphone anymore. This is demonstrated in the current trend of creating a “quantified self” through self-tracking by applications on the smartphone: people incorporate the smartphone’s technology in their daily life to acquire data about themselves. There is a wide variety of applications that gather data on aspects of a person’s life, such as health or fitness status (e.g. number of steps taken, monitoring sleep patterns) or daily activities (e.g. nutrition tracking). Users of such self-monitoring technology often seek to enhance some desired behaviour or improve personal performance in areas of fitness, productivity, or caloric intake, for example. In some application, an extra motivational factor is the possibility to share their data on social media (e.g. the route and number of kilometres one has been running) or to be able to gain virtual points and compete with friends (gamification) (Singer, 2011). The previous facts presented demonstrate the significance that the smartphone has gained for many of us in daily live. Therefore, analysing and exploring the effects of the smartphone as a medium by using McLuhan’s tetrad can give an important insight and better understanding of this everyday tool, the surrounding environment, and how it shapes (“massages”) us.