Shouldn't Be An App For That

As the only person between the ages of 15 and 35 without a true 'smartphone' (My phone can send emails, Tweets and photos, it just doesn't run all the apps. I like to say I have a smart-ish phone.), I admit to having limited knowledge when it comes to apps. I know what they do, I just don't have any personal experience with them. But from what I have seen when looking at other people's smartphones, it appears that there is an app for just about everything. You can shop for clothes with one app, get concert tickets using another app, make reservations at a restaurant and then call a cab with yet another app, brag about all the things you just did with the social media app, call in a tactical airstrike just for the hell of it and then play very detailed video games while you wait for SEAL Team 6 to arrive. Also, if the look of a particular app doesn't strike your fancy there are dozens more to choose from which do the same thing, so you can look around until you find one that looks aesthetically pleasing. And those are the the useful apps. For every app which performs a useful duty there are just as many which serve absolutely no purpose at all and those are just as technically impressive as the crucial ones, not to mention there are new ones coming along every day. Still, sometimes I wonder if we have gone too far and are reaching a point in which we expect there to be an app for everything.

I keep seeing this very disturbing PSA (is there any other kind lately?) in which people are standing around looking inside a glass room while a man inside begins to physically and verbally assault a woman. At first everyone is watching the scene for a few moments but then they start turning away uncomfortably, until finally one of the people watching the scene can't take it any more and picks up her phone, types away and then throws the phone through the glass. It sends a powerful message about not staying silent when you witness an act of violence, but it does lose some of its luster at the end, which is when you discover it is an ad for a new app which is designed to help users report domestic violence. The app gives downloaders a quiz regarding behavior they may have seen or heard to determine if what they saw was, in fact, domestic violence. If you get a high enough score the app will then give you a number to a local domestic abuse shelter or the police so you can report your suspicions. Then, because so many people are hesitant to call the police themselves as they don't want to get involved in what they feel is a private matter, the app will even allow you to make the report anonymously. I'm not saying this premise behind the app is a bad thing, I just don't like the fact it is necessary in the first place.

Thankfully I have never found myself remotely near a domestic abuse situation but I'll just go ahead and say that if you have enough of a suspicion that domestic abuse could be going on to the point you actually take the time to download the app and then fill out a quiz about it than my guess is there is domestic abuse going on. I'm not usually one to advocate for jumping to conclusions but when it comes to issues like this I tend to air on the side of caution because I would rather apologizing for being wrong later than wait too long and have something horrible happen in the interim, so if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck. That kind of app is not something you download because you are looking to kill time during an airport layover, so my feeling is that what the user really wants this app to do is force them into action by doing most of the work for them. That is bad news because horrible situations like this are all about timing and frankly, time is not on your side. I know delayed action is better than no action at all, but if the roles were reversed you would probably not want the person who was thinking about calling the police to hesitate at all. If you think the police need to arrest the person next door before something truly horrible happens, that is not the time to be worrying about your network's 4G nationwide coverage.

Not that I want to sound like an 80 year-old here, but this is what happens when people become too attached to their phones. I understand that technology has a way of being very seductive and taking a hold of you but clearly something is wrong when it suddenly becomes hard for a person to make a move unless their phones tells them they should. This is the problem with everyone getting too attached to their phones - we've forgotten how to interact with each other including the fact that sometimes gets uncomfortable and you just have to power your way through those moments as part of being a grown-up. No one likes conflict but these days it feels like we go out of our way to avoid it, almost as if viewing it through our phones makes it not real. This is not a new phenomenon, of course. When video cameras were just starting to take off  and trouble broke out all anyone thought to do was break out the camera and take pictures rather than help the people in danger We're still trying to figure out how to kick our urge to capture everything on tape since cellphone cameras now shoot tremendously clear videos. I guess it comes in handy when the police finally show up because then you can just show them the video rather than rely on memory but that still means the police have to show up and considering the main job of cellphones was always supposed to be making calls, getting them there should be the easy part.