The Danger of All-In-One

It's all at our fingertips -- but is that a good thing?

Have you ever had the experience of turning to your phone to check the time and falling into a rabbit hole of email, emojis, videos, newsfeeds, and who knows what else? Unlocking your phone to take a quick photograph can lead to a deep dive into your email inbox. Deciding to phone a friend can turn into watching a video of cats riding on a vacuum cleaner, and by the time you’re done watching eight of those in a row, you’ve forgotten the original reason for going on your phone in the first place.
 
Here lies the danger of all-in-one.
 
Our phones have gone from being bolted into the wall to handheld devices that also serve as map, camera, computer, companion, radio, stationary (i.e. correspondence), calendar, rolodex, agenda, television, photo album, time keeper, calculator, boredom buster, ETC.
 
It’s supposed to be a good thing, right? To have everything at your fingertips. It’s definitely an enticing notion—the convenience of a one-stop-shop. We used to go to the butcher to buy meat, the drugstore for medicine, the candy shop for sweets, the cheesemonger for slabs of cheese, and the bakery for our bread. Now we have Wal-Mart. We used to have a rolodex to keep phone numbers, an agenda for scheduling, a map in our car to consult when we got lost, and a camera to document the good times. Now we have our smartphone.
 
I remember the days—not so long ago!—when I my phone was just a phone. It served its purpose well, but it wasn’t my everything. I’ve always been the documenter in my friend group, so I was never without a camera. To get around, I had a GPS, or better yet, printouts from Yahoo! Maps to guide me from A to B. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, to have multiple items that did different things. In a way, the inconvenience had its benefit, same as when we had to shop at several stores to get supplies for dinner.
 
Many years ago, at the beginning of the smartphone phenomenon, I remember seeing an ad for Blackberry that read: “Make every moment productive.” I kept turning the words over in my mind, thinking about the underlying message of this seemingly harmless ad. Blackberry was offering the chance to turn spare moments into productive ones by using their product, an all-in-one device. Never lag behind on answering emails. Never miss a meeting. Never be unconnected from your work. God forbid you’re not productive during the duration of your commute, or while you sit in a doctor’s waiting room. The ad made the assumption that productivity was the main goal, but should it be?
 
It’s important to consider: do our smartphones make us productive—or simply over-stimulated? Now that we can do a million things at the same time – make a phone call while sending an email during which we find out someone’s commented on our post – we don’t do anything well. Our brains are distracted and our concentration is diluted. Like with the Wal-Mart effect on the products we consume, the quality of our attention and our productivity has gone down.
 
Our behavior has become rote and stale as we turn to our phone for all manner of necessities, from directions to companionship. Gone is our ability to not know something or to wait and find out later. Yes, we have all the information at our fingertips, but what are we doing with this knowledge? (And what is the difference between information and knowledge?) At what point does our mind become saturated with nonstop notifications, Wikipedia rabbit holes, weird photo filters, and cute cat videos?
 
In a world of 5G and Amazon Prime, we have been conditioned to expect instant gratification. If we have a question, we ask Siri. If we want to buy a new gadget, we press a button. In the words of Ariana Grande, “I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it.”
 
Our quest for convenience at any cost has come at a high price, and we’ve paid with our attention, creativity, and peace of mind.