I recently came across an old Quora post by Rebekah Cox extrapolating on a tweet in which she stated “The first company to fully execute on embedding your identity into your phone (making a truly first class experience) wins the next decade.” She argues that your identity is a function of 1)how you manage your attention and 2)your peers’ access to that attention, and that the areas where your attention is focused form a set of experiences that make up your identity. What does that say about you? As I write this my phone is buzzing, notifying me that my little sister is challenging me to a QuizUp game (Harry Potter). I just destroyed her – what does that mean? I let my little sister distract me from my work because I set QuizUp’s push notification setting to ‘on’, allowing my phone to interrupt my attention – so what?
I suspect that most would say that identities are already attached to mobile phones, with bank accounts, credit cards, emails, messages, social accounts, and even fingerprints already embedded into many of today’s devices, including mine. But does that information really make up an identity? I say it does. Your phone is the medium through which you communicate with peers, colleagues, and digital media, all of which affect your sense of self and others. You share ideas through and participate in networks with your phone (don’t tell me that you don’t), and is that not how you form an identity? I maintain an image on my social profiles that is the best representation of my public identity and how I want the world to view me. My phone has at least a part of my attention throughout the day and knows when it can interrupt my attention to something else, though less eloquently as Ms. Cox would like. It’s scary to think about how much a stranger can learn about me if he or she had access to my phone: who my friends are, what kind of music, art, and movies I like, how much money I have and where I have it, what I have purchased, and what my personality is like, to name a few. It’s like a part of my soul is in my phone. It’s almost like a Horcrux!
Think about losing your phone – I’ve lost an iPhone, and it was like I lost a part of myself, I felt naked and out of the matrix. I recently posted an article outlining the consequences of losing a smartphone on Found in Town’s Twitter account and it’s scary – in an experiment referenced in the article, 50 smartphones were systematically left in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. Among people who found the phones, 72 percent tried to access photos, 57 percent tried to open a file called “Saved Passwords,” and 43 percent tried to open an app called “Online Banking.” These people were attempting to use others’ identities for their own gain, and would have had the phones contained actual identities of real people.
The concept of an identity completely embedded in a device reminds me of the movie Her, which I highly recommend (it’s beautiful). It surprised me how easily I accepted the sci-fi future where people can be in romantic relationships with personalized, artificially intelligent operating systems as a believable possibility. Many people in the movie spend time interacting with their personalized operating systems because they understand them better than anybody! So much of our identity is in phones and digital networks that personalized experiences are already possible. There is no doubt in my mind that our identities and personalities are already embedded in our phones, and you should do everything you can to make sure their secure. Set good passwords and take measures to ensure your phone, and your soul, are protected.
