Reactionary smartphone
I've been struggling to understand my phone's recent behaviour, and I've suddenly come to an important reconceptualisation of what's going on.
First, some background. We tend to assume that the young are natural neophiles, taking to new things like ducks to water. But that's not true. Prensky's very problematic (but trendy) idea of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants is a good example of this muddled thinking. His argument was that a new bunch of students were coming through who were 'digital natives', having grown up with this stuff and fluent in it; older people, even if they came to the digital world, would be 'digital immigrants' having moved there in later life rather than having been born digital. This is empirically refuted: there are plenty of young people who are uncomfortable with digital technologies, and plenty of older people who are fluent. Much better, I think, to use the idea of digital residents and digital tourists or visitors.
Anyway. This was supposed to be a privileged-world whinge about minor frustrations with my phone, not a sociology lecture. (Actually, it's partly cathartic moan, partly an exercise in rubber-ducking, and partly a thinly-veiled bleg for Android help.)
My phone - a Nexus 5 - is in many ways a young gadget. But it doesn't like new things. It reacts badly to change. I think it's an old reactionary.
It got a new version of Android.
It didn't like it.
Instead of unlocking with a button press and a PIN, it started demanding a swipe up in between the two, which is really hard to do one-handed, and impossible to do if you've just pressed the button with your thumb until you've shuffled the phone around in your hand a bit.
Then it got another new version of Android, and for a short while, it was slightly better. It gained the ability to 'geofence', to unlock automatically when it was in a specific place. After reaching a score draw in an argument with work policies (which demand you have PIN unlock if you are to access work email on your phone), I paid the information price to Google (i.e. confirming my home location). And then, sometimes, when I was in the right bit of my home and my phone was in the right mood, it would unlock just with a button press.
Part of the problem - I thought - was that the wifi in my home only reached some of the rooms. In particular, it was flaky in my bedroom, and no signal in **TODO's room. When the router started getting more and more unreliable, I bit the bullet and bought a new router with extra power.
It didn't like it.
It could connect Ok - the wifi was rock-solid in my bedroom, and accessible if flaky in **TODO's room. But the phone sulked and went back to demanding the difficult swipe in the unlock process every time. My guess was that it did not believe it was at my home any more, except that if you asked it where it was, it said it was at my home. It also started refusing to work with my phone company's nifty app that connects texts and calls via wifi when you're at home, which was a really useful thing for me since the signal in my house is terrible and no phones apart from ancient Nokias get solid signal.
Then a while later it got yet another new version of Android. It didn't like it.
Obviously the thing with the new router had been festering all the while, and it lost it completely about wifi and started refusing to do it at all. After a lot of patient work, fiddly with settings and caches and gently re-introducing it to all the (surprisingly many) different wifi networks I wanted it to use, repeatedly, it relented a little and deigned to connect. Sometimes. If you turn it off and on again, or reboot, or forget the network and add it back, or something. Or if it feels like it. And when it does connect, it's at about half the signal strength it previously claimed. Now it is flaky in most rooms apart from the one with the router in (and then only when you're up that end of the room), and no signal in my bedroom. It's not the router - other phones, tablets and laptops connect to my router fine, and my phone has the same troubles on work wifi.
I didn't like that. And still don't. And have run out of ways of trying to fix it and have resorted to undignified online moaning instead.
Maybe it's my expectations that are wrong. My idea about gadgets is that if you get updates, they get better over time in terms of things they do, but slower. But there's no law of nature that says that has to be so, and some techie things get gradually more evil, like Facebook. Which reminds me - it's also getting rather Facebook-like in its demands to upload and share more and more of my data unless I deal correctly with unprompted uncancellable popups that appear from time to time.
To be fair, it has, since I bought it, gained a nifty feature on the camera where it can convincingly fake up the narrow depth-of-field thing you get on a proper camera. Although that stopped being fun to do after one upgrade or other when the touch-to-focus got unreliable.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/296556.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
First, some background. We tend to assume that the young are natural neophiles, taking to new things like ducks to water. But that's not true. Prensky's very problematic (but trendy) idea of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants is a good example of this muddled thinking. His argument was that a new bunch of students were coming through who were 'digital natives', having grown up with this stuff and fluent in it; older people, even if they came to the digital world, would be 'digital immigrants' having moved there in later life rather than having been born digital. This is empirically refuted: there are plenty of young people who are uncomfortable with digital technologies, and plenty of older people who are fluent. Much better, I think, to use the idea of digital residents and digital tourists or visitors.
Anyway. This was supposed to be a privileged-world whinge about minor frustrations with my phone, not a sociology lecture. (Actually, it's partly cathartic moan, partly an exercise in rubber-ducking, and partly a thinly-veiled bleg for Android help.)
My phone - a Nexus 5 - is in many ways a young gadget. But it doesn't like new things. It reacts badly to change. I think it's an old reactionary.
It got a new version of Android.
It didn't like it.
Instead of unlocking with a button press and a PIN, it started demanding a swipe up in between the two, which is really hard to do one-handed, and impossible to do if you've just pressed the button with your thumb until you've shuffled the phone around in your hand a bit.
Then it got another new version of Android, and for a short while, it was slightly better. It gained the ability to 'geofence', to unlock automatically when it was in a specific place. After reaching a score draw in an argument with work policies (which demand you have PIN unlock if you are to access work email on your phone), I paid the information price to Google (i.e. confirming my home location). And then, sometimes, when I was in the right bit of my home and my phone was in the right mood, it would unlock just with a button press.
Part of the problem - I thought - was that the wifi in my home only reached some of the rooms. In particular, it was flaky in my bedroom, and no signal in **TODO's room. When the router started getting more and more unreliable, I bit the bullet and bought a new router with extra power.
It didn't like it.
It could connect Ok - the wifi was rock-solid in my bedroom, and accessible if flaky in **TODO's room. But the phone sulked and went back to demanding the difficult swipe in the unlock process every time. My guess was that it did not believe it was at my home any more, except that if you asked it where it was, it said it was at my home. It also started refusing to work with my phone company's nifty app that connects texts and calls via wifi when you're at home, which was a really useful thing for me since the signal in my house is terrible and no phones apart from ancient Nokias get solid signal.
Then a while later it got yet another new version of Android. It didn't like it.
Obviously the thing with the new router had been festering all the while, and it lost it completely about wifi and started refusing to do it at all. After a lot of patient work, fiddly with settings and caches and gently re-introducing it to all the (surprisingly many) different wifi networks I wanted it to use, repeatedly, it relented a little and deigned to connect. Sometimes. If you turn it off and on again, or reboot, or forget the network and add it back, or something. Or if it feels like it. And when it does connect, it's at about half the signal strength it previously claimed. Now it is flaky in most rooms apart from the one with the router in (and then only when you're up that end of the room), and no signal in my bedroom. It's not the router - other phones, tablets and laptops connect to my router fine, and my phone has the same troubles on work wifi.
I didn't like that. And still don't. And have run out of ways of trying to fix it and have resorted to undignified online moaning instead.
Maybe it's my expectations that are wrong. My idea about gadgets is that if you get updates, they get better over time in terms of things they do, but slower. But there's no law of nature that says that has to be so, and some techie things get gradually more evil, like Facebook. Which reminds me - it's also getting rather Facebook-like in its demands to upload and share more and more of my data unless I deal correctly with unprompted uncancellable popups that appear from time to time.
To be fair, it has, since I bought it, gained a nifty feature on the camera where it can convincingly fake up the narrow depth-of-field thing you get on a proper camera. Although that stopped being fun to do after one upgrade or other when the touch-to-focus got unreliable.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/296556.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.