Once again a meme has caught my attention. (Which is, of course, what they are supposed to do.) This one shows a man with a smartphone surrounded by all the gadgets and electronic devices that one smartphone now hold. The caption reads: “Everything in this picture is now in your pocket.”
We get the point. We understand that today’s rectangular, electronic jackknife does pretty much everything we used to need many other things to accomplish. Also, it does more than the computers we used to send a man to the moon.
Pretty amazing, huh?
Trash That Didn’t Happen
But I see something even more positive in this photo. I see that all the materials used to make those multiple devices are no longer being mined, smelted, ground, fabricated, and polished. After that, of course, we did away with marketing and selling products that once filled shelves. Best of all, none of those products have been tossed out to add to humanity’s already huge and revolting waste stream.
Yup, this meme shows us the trash that didn’t happen. Think of all the cardboard never created, and never printed with toxic dyes. Think of the plastic blister packaging that never hit the wastebasket and the Christmas wrap that never got printed and then thrown out. Also, let us not forget the silicon used to make CDs to accompany the electronics or to play music.
We get so accustomed to hearing bad news that sometimes we can’t see good news when it’s staring us in the face.
A Plethora of Obsolete Products
To make my point perfectly clear, just check out this list of devices made obsolete by one smartphone:
Reading and Writing
- 50 pounds of books (via e-readers)
- Kindle e-reader
- Daily newspaper
- Address book
- Pocket foreign language dictionaries
- Notebook
- Paper comics
- Handwritten grocery list
Communication
- Landline telephone
- Landline
- Pay telephones and telephone booth
- Answering machine
- Walkie-talkie
- Rolodex file
Photography and Videography
- Pocket digital camera
- Film camera
- Scanner
- Voice recorder and CAMcorder
- Webcam
- TV remote controller
- Scanner
- Photo album
Money
- Bank ATMs (for banks that allow deposits via snapshot)
- Calculator
- ATM card / Credit card / Debit card
- Barcode scanner
- Credit card scanner
Travel
- Stand-alone GPS navigation device
- Road map / printout / AAA TripTiks from Mapquest and Google Maps
- Paper receipt file
- Pedometer
- Compass
- Printed airline ticket and boarding pass
Time Management
- Alarm clock
- Planner
- Calendar
- Kitchen timer
- Wristwatch
Games
- Video game console
- Playing cards (Solitaire)
Music
- iPod
- Radio (via NPR app / Hype Machine / iTunes / Spotify / Pandora)
- Set-top box remote
- Digital music device
- Music tuner
Tools
- Flashlight
- Leveler
- Light meter
- Measuring tape
- USB thumb drive
- Anti-snoring device
Partially supplanted:
- Television
- Movie theater
- Business cards
I’m sure there are more that I have missed.
Full disclosure: I still use a wall calendar because it’s easier to just glance over at the wall than to check my iPhone. Also, I like the pictures. And my fitness tracker acts as a wristwatch.
New Smartphone Functions
This list doesn’t include, of course, devices that didn’t exist prior to the smartphone, like equipment for instant translation and electronic musical scores. Prior to smartphones, we didn’t take pictures of our dinners and post them somewhere for total strangers to see. Mean girls had to depend on pen and paper for their bullying. Teenage boys had to sneak Playboy into the house.
Then, of course, we come to my all-time favorite, which I wrote about in 2016: UFO hunting. Today, observers can take photos and videos of UFOs and post them immediately on the internet. This makes it impossible for the government to find you while you wait for your pictures to be developed and confiscate them before they ever hit the mail. The Men in Black have joined the ranks of the obsolete.
In 2016, I wrote a post about “How Smartphones Change Society.” It has a whole list of ways in which the ever-present, pocket-sized devices allows us to see and hear things never before recorded. We have become accustomed to such information and rarely stop to think how much it has changed our perception of the world around us.
One Smartphone for Many Things
To be fair, smartphones do have their own environmental impact and it’s not totally positive. But my point today is that smartphones have replaced a plethora of things that would have taken an even greater toll on the planet both in terms of resources used and trash avoided. I think that’s a good think.
I have no doubt that someday the computer functionality will be developed into wetware and integrated into human bodies. We might say that Inspire, the anti-snoring sleep system that replaces C-PAP devices offers a baby step in that direction. More will come.
So the next time you use your smartphone for something other than making a call or sending a message, be thankful that you no longer need the small army of devices that have been replaced by the one in your hand. You don’t have to shop for them, buy them, or carry them around. Most importantly, you never have to throw them out.
