The Smartphone is Human | John Dyer

This is near the end of a blog tour promoting From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. A post from me every week, plus more at host site: ChurchM.ag. Check it out..

Chapter 11: Virtualization

Today's Internet-enabled smartphone is perhaps the most humanlike tool ever created.

I agree with John Dyer's quote.

It's because each part of it extends a natural human function. Dyer points out several. Print and text extends our capacity for abstract and rational thought (old school: books). Images are visual and emotive (old school: the photograph). So that's thought and emotion. Short messages extend our information (old school: telegraph). Voice and video interaction extends our human-to-human relational communication (old school: telephone).

The mobile phone combines them all. Thought, feeling, informing, relationship.

Human.

And I think like John does, that technology will increasingly be able to represent all the human senses and functions together, becoming more and more clear and representative. Think of it simply as the high definition… the more the resolution increases, the more it looks like you're actually there.

And of course, John wrote this before we started seeing iPhone's Siri, which is a whole new item along the same lines of discussion.

This is the final chapter of book review for ChurchM.ag. Read the post here.