We may grant that many of these riders see these landscapes every day; still, the landscapes are always changing, and are they really duller than what was appearing on their phone screens? Probably not, because their phone screens were at that moment proving to them that they had always been correct in every opinion they had ever held, and other people were monsters for disagreeing. That is the mission of social media.
On the streets downtown, the proportion was not quite so high; but still, among the pedestrians, many or most had their eyes glued to phone screens. It does tend to make them walk out into traffic, and perhaps Darwin ought to be allowed to do his work. But, on the other hand, even the most alert pedestrian, with phone in pocket or no phone at all, may be run down by the scrolling-while-driving motorist who runs a red light or turns left into a stream of people in the crosswalk. The state of Pennsylvania just recently made driving with a handheld phone illegal, and has placed signs to that effect along all major streets and highways. But there seems to be little diminution in the number of people who are driving while running through their TikTok feeds. To be fair to them, they probably haven’t seen the signs. How could they?
At sidewalk cafés downtown, people were sitting staring into their phone screens. On benches in Mellon Square, people were sitting staring into their phone screens. On the Diamond, people were sitting at tables staring into phone screens while a lonely guitarist failed to capture the attention of the lunch crowd.
Google and other authorities have long advocated a “mobile-first” approach to Web design: that is, giving mobile devices the priority when design decisions are being made. Two years ago, Dr. Boli argued that the mobile-first approach was wrongheaded: platform equality should be the rule. But insofar as it meant that desktop computers could no longer be regarded as the standard, “mobile first” was the right idea. More people see most sites on a phone screen than on a computer screen.
Now it seems to Dr. Boli that we have come to the point where we must take a mobile-first approach to life. We can no longer regard reality as the standard: more people see the world through their phone screens than through their unmediated eyes. Dr. Boli has already written about some of the symptoms of that change: how people perceive pictures as more realistic when they appear distorted the way our phone cameras distort them than when they appear the way they appear to our eyes. The principle, however, seems to be more general: the majority of people now see the world as a whole the way it appears on their phone screens. The screen is the default; the direct perception of reality is an occasional inconvenient necessity, and one that we increasingly forgo. This explains why mad conspiracy theories are mainstream now: an idea that can be entertained only by someone with a limited experience of reality can be entertained by a majority of the people, because most people have only a limited experience of reality. What the phone tells us is more real than what the world outside the screen tells us.
What does this observation mean for the people who are responsible for maintaining order in our society? Probably it means that they get everything they want if they just manipulate what we see on our screens cleverly enough. But let us assume that our dictators are benevolent. What do they need to do for us?
First of all, they need to assure our safety as we move through a world we no longer perceive except through a glass darkly. Modern automobiles have object-detection systems to warn us of a potential collision. The same things need to be built into our phones. The screen has to tell us that we are stepping in front of a streetcar, because we will not see the hazard in any other way. This becomes especially important in Pittsburgh, where it has just been announced that new streetcars are on the way that will be more than twice the length of the old ones.
Secondly, they need to make sure our infrastructure is hardened up with plenty of redundancy. There can be no outages in a world where truth is defined by the phone; being dropped back into reality, even for a moment, would be a terrifying experience.
Thirdly, they need to make sure, for the same reason as above, that phones cannot be lost. It should be possible in the near future, if it is not already possible, simply to replace the non-dominant hand with a phone-holder of standard size, which could then accept and lock in any preferred brand of phone.
Finally, they need to build quarantine areas or concentration camps for the small number of recalcitrant people who are still addicted to the experience of unmediated reality. Those people are in the way. In a world where the phone screen dictates what is true, the reality-addicts are a disruption. The more the things our phones tell us deviate from reality, the more reality becomes unacceptable. Mobile-first will have to be our rule, and it will have to be enforced.