THE
16
FUTURE
MOBILE
HAS THE SMARTPHONE JUST BECOME
A SMART
DEVICES? TECHNOLOGY IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE REVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATION Around 32m smartphones are purchased in the UK every year. Collectively we look at our smartphones over a billion times a day, taking every opportunity to use them from the moment we wake up until we go to bed. Those aged 18 -24 years are the most obsessive, with almost half of them checking their smartphone within 15 minutes of waking up, over 80% using them on public transport and almost half checking their phone unprompted to see if any new messages or updates have occurred or simply to find out some information. Of course, these acts aren’t just confined to that age group, with well over 75% of UK adults owning a smartphone, but certainly they are indicative of how it has become the key personal device of today, overtaking the PC, particularly for those born in the millennials. Staggering as those statistics from a Deloitte report may be, they really illustrate how technology continues to change how we communicate. Today, the evolution of communication methods is accelerating at a never-before-seen pace. Clearly, we live in an era where huge changes take place from one generation to the next. We often forget the fact that we use communication methods our grandparents and parents didn't have, take for granted the ones we use today and imagine that inevitably our children will use ones that don't yet exist. Certainly, writing a letter, sending a fax or using a pager are fading into extinction and that’s in less than a generation.
ARE WE LOSING OUR VOICE? However, it seems somewhat surreal to believe that the traditional phone call may well be the next endangered species in terms of communication. Yet Deloitte predicts that 25% of people using smartphones will have stopped making phone calls by the end of 2016 and they aren’t alone in that belief. Not surprisingly, the demographic with the largest proportion of almost data-exclusivity are 18-24 year olds with 29% not making voice calls on a weekly basis according to the analyst. So maybe the smartphone will become a misnomer in future and perhaps be just a smart device. Seems strange that in a relatively short period of just 15 years, the main reason to buy a mobile phone isn’t to make calls. Clearly things have changed and that change is down to the increasing number of ways communication can take place: e-mails, text messages, instant messaging and social media apps. For those of you who like stats, here are some amazing numbers according to DMR and statista: 1bn people use WhatsApp, 70% use it daily sending 42bn messages; there are 1bn Facebook Messenger users and 313m monthly active Twitter users. These numbers, which continually seem to grow, illustrate the point. It may seem an obvious observation, but a key catalyst for the fall in the proportion of people making fewer voice calls using their smartphone has been the proliferation in options to communicate without speaking, and the fact that an immediate response isn’t always required. Indeed, these communication tools offer the opportunity to communicate one to many, at the same time,
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