Read time:
The other day I wanted to accomplish something simple. I wanted my smartphone to ring loudly when someone called, but I also wanted to turn the volume down while watching a video.
That was it.
Instead, I found myself wandering through settings with names like Ringer and Alerts, Media Volume, Change with Buttons, and enough toggles to make me wonder whether I needed an engineering degree just to hear my phone ring.
I’m a child of the Space Age, now aging into retirement with a device in my pocket that would have seemed like pure sorcery when I was small. And yet here I am, still hunting for the right switch.
I was a head-in-the-clouds kid in 1972, growing up amid a world captivated by real-world rocket launches and early communication satellites, while my dad remained very practical and pragmatic—polar opposites. Yet, in that odd way we used to bond during ordinary moments like driving through town, I’d throw a big question at him:
“How do you think those Star Trek communicators work?”
True to form, he didn’t care about the space opera; he just thought about the mechanics. Living in an era when real-world communication satellites were just starting to stitch the globe together, he thought for a moment and said they probably used some kind of radio signal that bounced off satellites so people could talk to each other no matter where they were. That sounded brilliant to me. As it turns out, he wasn’t all that far off.
The device that represented the future in my childhood had one obvious function: flip it open and talk. On the rare occasions Captain Kirk needed to adjust it, a single button press usually did the job.
Our smartphones can do things that would have seemed like magic in 1966 [when the show debuted]. They contain cameras, GPS receivers, a movie studio, a music player, a medical assistant, and access to nearly all human knowledge. The computers that guided Apollo 11 to the moon had a fraction of its processing capability. The little supercomputer I casually carry around while looking for the right volume setting has more power than the machines NASA used to send astronauts a quarter of a million miles away.
The future I watched on television has become ordinary. And yet the simple thing never changed:
I wanted one volume to stay loud and another to stay quiet. The complication came from all the ways the phone could behave instead.
It’s strange how often this happens now. I open a streaming service with thousands of movies and somehow can’t decide what to watch. I walk into a grocery store carrying dozens of pasta sauces and leave wondering why buying spaghetti has become an exercise in comparative analysis. I buy an appliance and discover that before it will toast bread, it would also like to hand-shake with my wireless network.
Sometimes I mistake options for freedom. Other times I think the options really are freedom, and I’m simply overwhelmed by them. I’m not sure which is true. I’d shrug, but the shackles are heavy…
Somewhere between Captain Kirk’s communicator and my smartphone, I crossed a line. I gained astonishing capability. Along the way, I also gained an astonishing number of settings.
Somewhere in my smartphone is a setting that does exactly what I want.
I think.