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High technology is intimately linked to the daily lives of most human beings. For many, it is already linked to most of the minutes of the day.
The telephone has morphed from a means to speak with others not physically present, to a device that now enables not only all means of immediate and delayed communication with both individuals and groups, but also, in the form of an internet-connected device, the smartphone, one that enables a remarkable, and ever-expanding, set of activities. These include playing games with persons one will never meet, social networking with anyone interested or with particular audiences, television-watching, music-playing, match-making, date- and sex-finding, web-surfing, news-retrieving, community-building, way-finding, reservation-arranging, picture-sharing, banking, ride-finding, self-monitoring, record-keeping, and number-crunching. The smartphone remains, as was the telephone, a way of staying in contact with those not in immediate proximity, but now, via complexly-constructed visual as well as auditory self-presentations on social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, and Twitter, it reaches out to others who become real or imaginary friends.
In ego-psychoanalytic terms, a smartphone might well be conceived as an augmenter of the ego’s adaptive powers, and as an extension of the ego’s capacities par excellence: a device enabling a great number of activities that previously required many more resources. These previously-required resources included more time and planning needed in order to access activities and tasks, much more physical activity, and work with earlier technologies such as radios and television sets. Each of these earlier inventions served only single functions, whereas a smartphone may combine in one completely portable device scores of technologic functions. A more capacious, more powerful ego, might result from such technologic enablement of the individual. Such a view would be quite congenial to the aims of the