Why do we keep calling the smartphone phone even though we don’t use it to call.

For moral and intellectual hygiene I must start this text by confessing that since I was little I have always been a fan (inflamed, crazy, radical) of Racing de Avellaneda. inexplicably; because I was born in a small town in Andalusia and, in those years, my only contact with Argentina was a bottle of dulce de leche that we kept in the pantry.

I clarify it so that it is appreciated how much it is costing me to recommend ‘Hello? a requiem for the telephone‘. And it is that the author of it will be a magnificent novelist, a very funny thinker and an excellent person, yes; but above all he is a Boca Juniors fan. “Nothing’s wrong”, I tell myself as I write these lines. “It could be worse, it could be from Independiente.”

A generation that does not know what a telephone is

Apart from the joke, the book is very good. Above all, because when you write about a technology in full retreat you always run the risk of becoming a “old man yelling at the clouds“. And there is something of that, of course. But Kohan goes much further and, while acknowledging that we have gained a lot in these years, he also reflects on what we have lost.

From the adolescent ritual of calling the person we liked and having to talk, in the meantime, with the father, mother or older siblings, he called a number that, apparently, existed in Argentina that you could call to They will tell you the time. Things that made up the world before the mobile phone entered our lives and that may seem insignificant, but that they constituted a specific way of speaking, listening and bonding that has already ceased to exist.

Reading the book, as they went through the long end of conventional telephony in its pages, I asked myself a question so simple that I didn’t know how to answer: why do we continue to call the smartphone a telephone if we don’t use it to call?

And, be careful, I recognize that “we no longer use it to call” can be controversial, but for practical purposes the data is with me. According to surveys, instant messaging has eaten up the land of the telephone in a spectacular way. while a 60% of the population sends messagess on a daily basis, only one in four make some kind of calls from their mobile and only 12% use a land line.

It is clear that it is something very generational. 98.6% of young people between 25 and 34 years old use instant messaging as their preferred channel of communication. Figures that do not occur in the population as a whole. However, as time goes on, that “generational feature” is becoming the generational default.

And, deep down, it is not just a question of “uses and customs”. What we carry in our pocket has long ceased to be “a mobile phone”: it is a computer. After all, we went to the Moon with devices less powerful than any smartphone, and yet we continue to call them mobile.

The way we think about technology

It’s not that I miss you. In fact, it reminds me of recurring controversy about whether using a floppy as a save symbol is still useful. Or a hat for messages or a magnifying glass to search. That is to say, about how the terms, symbols and ideas become ‘independent’ of their classical referent and start to be used in another way.

The issue, however, has another turn. A few weeks ago, we argued on magnet how each culture has a different way of understanding time (and the future and the past). Apparently, while for speakers of Latin languages, time goes from left to right; for Arabic and Hebrew it works the other way around. And, in the case of the Chinese and Japanese, the past stays on top and the future on the bottom.

This seems to be a consequence of how we write, but (be that as it may) it has consequences for how we interact with the world. A well-known example is that of the behavioral economist, Keith Chen. According to Chen’s analysisthe speakers of languages ​​that do not have verb forms to refer to the future (or are weaker and more non-specific), have an easier time saving in the long term.

That is, the way we think about things conditions, enhances or limits what we do with those same things. Hence, it is inevitable to ask ourselves… What are we missing by thinking of smartphones as if they were a telephone?

In Magnet | The future is “below”: how our language radically changes the way we understand time

Image | Julian Hochgesang