Nobody likes a snob, but if you own a decent smartphone it’s very hard not to become one.
By Darragh Harkin
It’s a simple enough question: are the people who use smartphones a bit snobby? Have you seen someone with an iPhone look down their nose at the standard phone user? Did a Blackberry owner laugh at your simple text-and-talk mobile while they played away with some social networking site? Or maybe you are reading this right now with a phone that’s so new I’ve never heard of it, most of us will never afford it and you will love it more than some do their own flesh and blood?
So are these people snobs? They have a smartphone and frequently feel the need to tell you about it, which sounds a bit snobby to me. But before you think I’m judging them just let me say this: I too am a smartphone user.
I’ve been a smartphone user for over 18 months and so far have had a smartphone that never really did its job. Twitter, Facebook, internet browsing and such things never really worked correctly or sometimes at all. E-Mail worked perfectly as did calls and texts but never anything that you could brag about. I mainly kept it in my pocket and so escaped the traps of smartphone snobbery.
This week however I got an upgrade and automatically leaped into the realms of phone snobbery. Sure I’m a nice person but once the new piece of technological genius was in my hand a sense of “why would anyone not have one of these?” washed all over me.
Niceness be gone, phone snobbery is taking over.
I first noticed the phenomenon of phone snobbery back in the late 90s, the days of polyphonic ring tones and something called an SMS that you couldn’t actually use yet as the technology wasn’t in this country. The snobbery in this case surrounded one of the first popular mobile games and its name was Snake.
Light years behind things like Angry Birds but just as addictive, Snake was the pioneer of games made to waste time on your phone. A person could take their phone to the bathroom, whip out their snake and not be seen for hours.
It seemed like everyone had a Nokia then and everyone had snake, but then the snobbery kicked in as new phones came out and on them was SNAKE 2. An upgrade and a far superior game to the first, Snake 2 players laughed in the face of people like me who could only walk away in shame and dream of some day owning a decent phone.
Fast forward a few years and The Dandy Warhols’ “Bohemian Like You” along with David Beckham’s endorsement combined to make camera phones sexy. Who knew you could take a digital picture with a phone? It didn’t really matter that the digital picture in question had less detail than a child’s story book and more edges than a Rubik’s Cube. All that really mattered is that it was cool, that Becks had one and we all wanted one too. Sadly by the time I got one people had moved onto music playing phones and so my quest for phone snobbery continued.
Fast forward to the present day and by now I’d had my fill of listening to smartphone users telling me how wonderful their little machines were. We all know how great these phones are but don’t need to be reminded about it constantly. You can barely step out the door without hearing: “Have you joined Four Square yet?” “Check out the app for this” “I can’t believe I even had a life before my blackberry”.
But listen, all this is futile as I have now joined the pack. Years of giving out about the attitude of smartphone users has been washed aside in one moment and here I am joining their gang. Not only have I joined the gang but my level of snobbery in just a few days is practically unheard of, barely a conversation has gone by without me whipping out my phone and showing off some cool hip feature that it can do.
It’s a sickness I tell you, something that just takes a hold and won’t let go. I could of course just stop talking about it but having spent so long cementing my place against phone snobbery I think my turncoat stance is here to stay.
The best that I, you and the hip elderly person with a bitching Blackberry can hope for is to tone down the phone snobbery. In time there may be self-help classes to deal with this problem or perhaps some sort of rehab clinic for those with extreme cases. This is something we can only hope for and the best approach is to just take one day at a time. Put one foot in front of the other and hope for the best.
And if you find yourself struggling with this method, lost in a world of hairy looks and smugness of your snobbery, adrift in a sea of regular phone users, it’s important not to panic. Sure doesn’t your phone have a Sat Nav and will happily get you right back on track?
Darragh Harkin can be heard on Saturday mornings 8am-10am on i102-104FM and 10am-1pm on i105-107fm
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