Andy Gilmore
Look at your smartphone. Think about the decisions you will make on it today. You may snag a dinner reservation, tell your spouse you're running late, or craft a response to an email from your boss. But you might also decide that the light peering through the trees is worth an Instagram or figure out how to describe your exasperation with a troubling new development in Iraq in 140 characters. You may write something longer on Facebook about the joy of seeing your 5-year-old make a new friend at the park, or the frustration of watching your father get old and need to move into a home. You may choose a song on Spotify, stream a movie on Netflix, or open a Kindle book. You may decide how to frame a selfie to send to a friend or lover.
It's easy to think of our digital revolutions—the desktop computer, the Internet—as purely technological achievements. Cheaper microprocessors let everyone have a PC at home. Internet protocols allowed computers to talk to each other. But that doesn't capture the reasons these breakthroughs mattered so much to us.
At their core, these were also creative revolutions. The PC didn't truly touch us until the rise of desktop publishing, followed by the rise of multimedia development tools, followed by the rise of web development tools. Its emotional power arrived with the ability to create amazing things on it. Likewise, the Internet revolution really took off when we used it not just to download facts and figures but as a platform to share music, writing, movies, and pictures. The number one site on the web may be Google, but number two and three are Facebook and YouTube, respectively—both primarily outlets for personal expression. We created the desktop computer and the Internet as tools for efficiency, productivity, and communication. But they came to have real meaning for us when our natural creative drive took them over.
Now it's the phone's turn. The smartphone began with a promise of productivity. Its first “killer app,” in the parlance of those developing for it, was email. Smartphones let us send messages without launching a computer; that's what made them smart. Web browsing followed, but the device was still seen as a surrogate for the computer at your desk—something to keep you productive while out in the world. Today, though, the phone has become something else. The smartphone, like the PC and the Internet before it, has turned into a unique outlet for our creative impulses, and it will affect our creative lives even more fundamentally.
It's a cliché in the tech and business realms to say that the world is going mobile. Mobile first! Mobile only! Mobile native! We accept that this is happening, but we seldom explore what it means to us as people. Our phones, always connected and always with us, have become incredibly personal. They belong to us, to an extent that no previous device ever achieved. Because of that we belong to them too, and it's a bond that shapes us at the deepest level—in how we express ourselves, in what we hold out as beautiful and compelling, in how we try to emotionally connect, in ways abstract and literal, with our friends and muses. Our phones are now indelibly bound up with our aesthetic souls. And today both are always on.
