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Follow on Google News |  How mobile phones are turning into phantom limbs by batteryfast‘Phantom limb’ syndrome is suffered by many amputees, who feel strange and often painful sensations coming from their missing limbs.
By: battery Recent experiments have shown how we can identify other people’s limbs and even inanimate objects as being part of our body. For the most part this only happens in specialised situations, but there are tools that we use so often that we could consider them to be parts of ourselves – none more that mobile phones. With our reliance on mobile phones increasing to the point where they’re the first thing we look at in the morning and the last thing at night, would we feel their absence as painfully as a limb’s, creating a ‘phantom mobile’? And what does this mean for how we think, work, and live in the future? It’s common to decry people’s use of mnemonic devices such as mobiles and laptops as being essentially feeble; real men and women don’t need mobiles or Google, they use notepads and reference books. The complaint isn’t new – Plato made the same point about the written word over two millennia ago: “…[Writing] So, in the grand scheme of things, it can be hard to take criticism of mobiles that seriously. But a new study of close to 1,000 students in ten countries suggests that mobiles have been a truly integral part of young people’s lives. The students were asked to go without any media – TV, internet, games, mobile phones, and news – for 24 hours and then write up their experiences. The responses speak for themselves: USA: “I’m so obsessed with checking my cell phone and my Facebook and the New York Times Web site, that I lose track of the people who are physically with me sometimes.” Slovakia: “I don’t write down notes on the paper, I don’t have a paper calendar, I don’t even have a grocery list on paper. Everything is in my phone.” For millions, mobiles aren’t just a means of communication – they’re absolutely critical for managing their work and personal life by acting as a combination notepad, dictionary, encyclopaedia, calendar, address book, newspaper, and filing cabinet. No wonder a student from Mexico began imagining vibrations that weren’t there: “I had left it in the car; I had the feeling that something was vibrating and I thought it was my cell and I began to search for it, and found nothing.” Yes, it’s foolish to draw conclusions from anecdotes, but a surprising number of the students self-reported feeling as though they were in withdrawal without their mobiles. For a day, at least some students seemingly suffered from ‘phantom mobile’ syndrome. None of this would be surprising to anyone who carries a BlackBerry as part of their job; it’s not for nothing that they’re nicknamed ‘crackberries’ Is this cause for concern? Andy Clark and David Chalmers, professors of philosophy at Edinburgh and the Australian National University and authors of the Extended Mind Thesis would say no. Since Plato’s lament on writing, we’ve relied on external devices whether they’re wax tablets or filofaxes to supplement our cognitive processes and extend our minds. We use them not because we’re lazy, but because they work better and faster than the alternatives. They work so well, in fact, that in the space of 20 years we’ve gone from from practically zero to over 1.3 mobiles per person (including children) in the UK. In other words, most adults have not one but two mobile phones, and with every advance in memory, portability, and power, they become more useful and indispensible. Opting out is as unthinkable as chopping off our own hands – not only would we be out of touch with the world, but in many companies, we’d be out of a job. Looking forward another 20 years, it’s not hard to imagine mobiles becoming as ubiquitous, essential, and normal as eyeglasses. Which brings up the uncomfortable question of the downsides of this future. If – and when – these devices fail, whether through an attack or accident, could we all become catastrophically disabled, and is that reason enough to turn our backs on them while we still can? Let’s keep this in perspective. There’s another technology that we rely on every second of every day to keep the world running: electricity. Without electricity, our civilisation would collapse far more quickly and more completely than any lack of mobile phones; no doubt commentators in the 19th century would be horrified by our total dependence on it. We depend on it because it does so much for us, and accordingly we spend billions to build redundant systems and excess capacity. Mobile phones – and whatever they are becoming – are as central to our lives in the 21st century as electrity has been in the 20th. We should take advantage of their ability to enhance and extend all of our capabilities, but be mindful of what our reliance means. Amputees know what it means to suffer the pain of phantom limbs. If we are going to make mobiles a part of work, personal lives, and ‘extended minds’, we need to be sure we have the necessary backups and contingencies, lest we all experience our own phantom pain. More other Information: Dell Latitude d630 d620 laptop Battery US: http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/ UK: http://www.batteryfast.com/ # # # http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/ We aim at offering the most updated and high quality consumer electronics to shoppers from all over the world. End
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