As at October 2017, 85% of the UK population had a smartphone;[1] bog standard mobiles are passé, and feature phones are in many ways a pointless compromise between the devices that can only call and text and those that have all the bells and whistles, but the smartphone juggernaut trundles on. The smartphone is now so fully integrated into the lives of millions of people that if they were suddenly removed, or simply unusable for any reason, it's difficult to see how many people could actually function. And our reliance on them, both from a practical point of view and from an addictive perspective, is increasing. The flip-side of that is a marginalisation of groups within the population who, for whatever reason, do not embrace the smartphone and its various uses.
The majority of people under the age of twenty-five - the generation that has not known a world without mobile phones - are comfortable with the increasing number and variety of uses for their smartphones, whether it is messaging, social media, navigation, payments, or games, their phones are their world and mobile phone dependence is now accepted as being as real as a substance addiction.[2] Contrarily, one of the things that they use them for less and less is making phone calls. This addiction is fed by the number of new ways in which smartphones are being enabled to perform everyday functions, provide solutions to problems we didn't know we had, and generally replace the means by which we have traditionally performed those everyday functions in the past. Want to pay for your coffee? Use Starbucks' app (or Costa's or Caffe Nero's, depending on your coffee shop of choice). Travel on the tube, or the bus? Use TfL's Oyster Card app to pay your fare. Popping into Tesco for some groceries? Pay with one of the payment apps like Apple Pay, or Google Pay. Then there are the car parking apps; increasingly car parks are offering pay by smartphone options through apps like RingGo and here is one area in which the future may come with some frustrations.
I downloaded the RingGo app after entering a car park where paying by cash was not possible. Living in London I have been long familiar with the fact that if you want to travel by bus, then cash is no longer king and it's an Oyster or contactless payment card or nothing, but my visit to one car park recently offered me the option to pay for my parking by phone only. Vending or parking machines that do not accept cash, but do accept cards, are one thing, but no machines at all means that to pay for parking it is phone and pay, or use the app. So I downloaded the app, and in fairness I have no complaints - in fact it's almost faultless - except for the lack of choice; without a mobile phone of some kind it is not possible to pay to park, and this increasingly has to be an area of concern for people who would prefer not to use their phone for that purpose, don't have a phone capable of the task, or simply don't have a phone at all, although that last group is shrinking every day.
In the name of progress, and conceivably in the name of convenience, more and more functions are migrating to our phones, which is fair enough, so long as alternatives that do not require a smartphone continue to be offered, which is where I have an issue. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem in embracing many of these apps; I habitually use coffee shop apps to pay for food and drinks, I use Google Pay more than any other payment method these days (I can go the best part of a week sometimes without paying cash for anything), I use the RingGo app in car parks that offer it, and of course I use my phone for browsing retailer's websites and buying stuff online. But - and here's the nub of the matter - I like to have a choice, and increasingly our choices are being taken away from us - slowly, perhaps, but being taken away nonetheless.
More and more companies, and more and more local authorities and utility companies are becoming like secret societies. Look at any number of websites and click on the Contact Us link and one thing that is either missing or nigh on impossible to find is a telephone number. Amazon's website doesn't even have a 'Contact Us' option, preferring instead to bury any contact details behind a whole series of pages and innumerable clicks that eventually offer the promise of being able to contact them by phone, but don't provide a number to dial. From experience, the best way to find a phone number for most companies is to ignore their website and just Google it.
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| Spot (or not) the Contact Us link in Amazon's website. |
One of my hobbies is watching my team, Romford FC, play football, and when I go to a game I like to get a programme. There has been a trend in recent years for clubs to move away from the traditional programme towards digital offerings; some clubs, like Barnet FC in the Vanarama National League, Cheshunt FC in the Bostik League, and Hashtag United of the Eastern Counties League Division One publish online programmes only, so no paper programmes at all.[3] With increasing print costs, this move is understandable, but for many people, there is little or no appeal in reading a programme on their phone, and if you don't have a smartphone, or can't get a signal, you'll not be able to read the programme where most people read them, at the ground. And speaking of Hashtag United, when Romford played them in a friendly recently, one of their followers had no cash with them and expected to be able to pay to get into the ground using a card, so just as some people may be excluded from certain services by their inability to access them using a smartphone, so some people may be excluded for exactly the opposite reason, having embraced technology so completely that they have no 'old-fashioned' alternatives.
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| The online only programme... |
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| ...personally, I prefer the old-fashioned paper variety. |
Amazon, Tesco, and Sainsbury's are all trialling stores where the customer uses their phone to scan and pay for their purchases[4] and till-free stores are clearly considered to be the way forward by many large retailers. I am happy to use the self-service tills that are to be found in many stores and use contactless or mobile payment methods to pay, and it's probable that when they are more widespread, I'll use the till-less stores too. But, I like to have the choice not to use my phone, I like to be able to buy a physical programme at a football ground, I like to go to a till and interact with a human being to exchange my cash for their goods and services. In a nutshell, I like choice. Progress is good, change is good, but freedom of choice is better.
[3] This move has angered and disappointed a lot of people; some people won't even watch a game if there is no programme; http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2017/08/chasing-paper.html
[4] See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45172631
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