Think about it. Jobs gave a voice to every idiot on the planet. We wouldn’t be here had the smartphone remained a tool for business types or a toy for nerds.
That tech was coming regardless. Andy Rubin was already working on Android.
The tech was headed in a different direction. Early Android was nothing like iPhoneOS, it had to play catch-up and adapt to the new form factor (boring rectangle with a touchscreen). Apple created a demand for their cool shiny toy in a way that Android couldn’t have done. Think about it, by the time the first iPhone was announced, we already had Windows, Symbian and Blackberry phones. Regular people were not buying them, they were a niche product. Android was just heading to join their ranks.
Regular people had stated buying them. I had a smartphone and at least one of my friends did a well. Even feature phones were getting so many apps they were converging on being smartphones. They were already getting Facebook and Twitter apps even on those feature phones.
Symbian S60 phones were basically smartphones with java apps, I remember browsing the web at large before there was even a browser in the first iphone.
I also remember people installing little Java apps on the woefully underpowered Motorola Razr.
Yup, what I meant is that we were already on track of everyone having a computer with internet on their pocket, even if not as capable as the iphone at first.
Blackberries were already there and pioneered a lot of the technologies that made mobile networks possible.
Really the only thing the iPhone did is make those things more consumer friendly rather than business focused.
Global war and middle eastern conflicts existed before the internet. Such a boomer lacking object permanence take.
Plus, social media is actually doing us a lot of good in this situation. War is worse than hell and most of the population really doesn’t want it, and new forms of media that both expose us to more of the reality of war and allow us to voice our dissent moves the Overton window a lot.
So we’ve had a few dozen casualties and a couple planes shot down so far. This could realistically be expected out of a conflict this size, and until recently it would have been a story in a newspaper and not much else. But the internet allows all of us to scrutinize and push back on each casualty in real time, and I think that’s a good thing.
