Essay: "Stand By Your Phone"

Faithful readers will recall that I recently wrote that I needed a new telephone.  Specifically, I acknowledged that I should probably get an iPhone but admitted that I was not sure that I could bring myself to so.  Well, I finally got my new phone last week.  After briefly considering all of the four major smart phone options (Windows, Blackberry, Android and Apple) I eventually settled on the Nokia Lumia 900, running Windows 7.5.  The main reason for my decision was that the Windows Phone was the only one I had no experience with, and I was curious to give it a try.

I am happy to report that the Windows Phone is very nice.  The user interface feels great, so much so that I daresay the Android/Apple interface feels a tad plain vanilla in comparison.  I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get my music into the Zune system and onto my phone, and I've had a lot of fun downloading loads of different apps and games.

Yesterday I went to the beach and I read an article in Vanity Fair on "How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo".  The article could fairly be described as a "hit piece"; it spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on Microsoft's failures (Zune, Bing, Vista) and completely failed to mention its successes (Xbox, Windows 7, and its continued dominance in personal computers despite Apple's inroads in other areas).
The article bugged me, but it got me thinking about which phone company is likely to "win" the next generation.  Obviously Android and Apple are the front runners, but Windows will be launching its new operating system that will run across computers, tablets and phones.  How ironic that they might have a superior product, but not succeed because they are too late to market (arguably what happened to Apple computers when Microsoft became the standard for personal computers).  RIM will also (finally) launch its new phones in the near future, and who knows what they will be like.
But then it struck me; despite all of these interesting comparisons, contrasts, facts and so forth, all of the phones are almost entirely identical.  They all (of course) make telephone calls.  They send texts.  They have nice user interfaces.  They play music and take pictures, and have apps.  There is almost no material difference between them at all.  Considering how much passion phones inspire in people, including me, if you were to ask me what phone to buy, I would have to say, in all honesty, that it makes no difference at all.

If you have a dog in this fight, then you will get your back up. You might talk about how Apple has more apps (never mind that all the important ones are available everywhere) or that Android is more "open" (something that is surely irrelevant to 99.9% of the population) or that Windows has the best interface (which is subjective, and not particularly important anyway).  The reality is that there is just no difference to the average consumer, that all three devices are made by billion dollar corporations that don't give a shit about us, and giving the issue even one single brainwave is a complete waste of yoru time.

But you know what?  It's good to be irrationally loyal to your phone, if you're honest about what you're doing.  Why?  Because it it provides a wonderful opportunity to watch your brain acting crazily from the inside.

So often we assume that it is always other people who are being irrational, not us.  Fundamentalists Christians who vote Republican and don't believe in evolution, birthers who say Obama was born in Kenya, truthers who believe 9/11 was an inside job, army colonels who only drink distilled water and grain alcohol to preserve the integrity of their precious bodily fluids.  We see this stuff on the news, or the web, and it is so tempting to think that they are irrational, and we are not.  But of course that's not true.  We're all irrational, in the sense that we don't arrive at our beliefs through reason.  Instead, we arrive at our beliefs through unreason and then use reason to reinforce what we already believe.  We all do this, not just religious people.  That's the natural way that our brains work.

To use a somewhat socontroversial example, do you believe there is a link between race and intelligence?  If you're like me, you don't, and you would get offended even at the suggestion.  However, if you ask yourself why you believe that, the honest answer is likely to be that is what you were taught when you were young, and that's the message conveyed to you by the media in our culture.  Let's be honest; you did not do a rigorous study on the question.  It's a pre-existing belief.

And if you are presented with evidence that contradicts this pre-existing belief, such as the stone cold fact that there is a correlation between race and IQ scores in the United Sates even when you control for socio-economic status, again if you are like me, you will resist it.  You will look for reasons to explain away that fact (and, to be clear, you will find plenty of them regarding this particular issue; there are all sorts of problems with the race/IQ correlation that don't involve knee-jerk emotionalism).  The point here is not what you believe, but how you believe it.

I don't believe there's ever any point in hiding from the truth, it will always out, in the end.  And the sad truth, as I've written before, is that we are not rational.  It takes a tangible effort to swim against the tide of unreason in our minds, and it is an effort we are not likely to make if we don't feel it's necessary.  In this regard, your love for your phone is like a bit of string tied around your finger.  Every time you wonder how someone could be stupid enough to believe that the world was created by an alien warlord named Xenu, just remind yourself that you are stupid enough to love a phone.  There is certainly a quantitative difference there, but I am not at all sure there is a qualitative one, if you know what I mean.