The 'Device' Revolution

Personal devices: An Ongoing Revolution It's a trend that has swept the way the world thinks,, communicates does business, and helped boost growth of social media. A revolution in communications and human interaction is taking place. The accompanying photos reveal some observable ways the 'look' of the person on the street and otherwise in pubic has been transformed. It began with advent of personal 'laptop' computers and brick-size 'portable cell' phones, and has progressed through myriad other portable devices,and this is 'just the beginning'. The i-pod (music players), the 'smart' phone (lead by the i-phone), tablets and beyond, have established 'device' dominance in the daily lives of those fortunate to have a little money to buy increasingly inexpensive devices. Many counties are almost entirely dependent on wireless cell/mobile phones, having mostly abandoned their efforts to wire all phones. Utility wiring now is much more dependent on the need to deliver Internet service than phone service. Utilities now read electric and water meters often through radio signals or the Internet, making 'meter-reader' an increasingly outmoded profession. Children worldwide long for a 'Gameboy' or other personal electronic game player which almost always goes on to dominate their attention for spans that children were once though incapable of maintaining. Kids while countless hours on their 'Gameboys' and the like as , adults and kids alike communicate, take pictures, compute, and perform countless other tasks using their 'smart' phones which in reality are miniature, portable computing and communication devices. that serve as portable calculators, cameras, Internet connected devices and through apps (applications) even can detect and diagnose 'skin cancers' and other diseases. A 'smart' phone or tablet not only is a phone, but a personal electronic reader, calculator, radio and video streaming and movie playing machine. And that barely begins an enumeration of all the functions such devices can perform. The smartphone now allows one to communicate with their personal Internet equipped refrigerator to check on or even turn down the temperature, to starting one's car remotely, turning on the Internet-connected coffee pot in the morning, and even giving one's self an electrocardiogram then getting it read remotely through a cigarette-pack size portables(12-lead) that communicates with a cardiologist half a world away instantly through one's smart phone. A doctor friend has invented and is marketing such a device -called the Heart-In (trademark registered). It retails for less than$300. People's eyes and ears often are glued to such devices, and they have changed the look of people in public as they check their devices, or often use them as cameras, electronic books, or entertainment devices or countless other tasks to while away otherwise boring hours. Kids long for latest games for their personal gaming devices, then while away countless hours manipulating the controls in sometimes astonishing displays of eye-hand coordination AND unbroken attentiveness that should astonish most moms and grade school teachers. A modern house has a 'smart doorbell' which answers through an Internet video feed to a remote homeowner. Shopping increasingly is done through the Internet using smart phones and tablets. Home delivery is rapidly outmoding many retail establishments and even shopping centers -- making the need for 'brick and mortar' stores less relevant. That is expected to change the retail landscape because as we change how we shop, the need for 'stores' of brick and mortar are less relevant. Home shopping, mostly through portable devices, has made many retail stores and shopping centers outmoded and threatens the need for so much retail business space. Once dominant regional shopping centers to the supermarket and the corner grocery are increasingly threatened, asshopping and home delivery increasingly make owning and renting out store space less profitable. Tenants for such stores are in increasingly short supply, with retail vacancies increasing. Lack of tenants already has doomed may retail shopping centers and even 'local' stores. That may cause a great transformation in our urban and suburban landscape as retail stores and huge shopping malls become less relevant.. Latest news brings a report that enemies (and the curious) worldwide are able to monitor GPS ( Global Positioning System) signals emitted by personal fitness trackers worn on wrists of military personnel even as they go on 'secret' missions ,and concentration of such devices can even reveal locations of 'secret' installation though Internet monitoring of the presence and paths of wearers revealed as they move about and sometimes exercise in a particular location . This is especially revealing in poorer countries where locals seldom use such devices. Such monitoring can presently be done worldwide by almost anybody --including enemies -- through the Internet. News brings word of the world's largest theft, through possibly remote hacking of a 'Bitcoin' crypto storage facility -- creating a loss of an estimated $530 million in 'Bitcoin' 'cryptocurrency'. And it's just begun. These photos show how 'personal devices' are transforming the way people look and act in public. (copyright 2018, John Crosley, all rights reserved. This text and/or accompanying photos may not be reproduced, rewritten, or otherwise used for any purpose except with express prior written permission of the author/photographer,) John John (Crosley)