Over the past decade, an explosive increase in the use of personal digital devices among first-world country citizens has occurred.There's no point in finding statistics or referencing data figures. We're all (as in any individual who might possibly be reading this text) part of the demographic and it's blatantly obvious no matter where you go. Cell phones and iPods and various little electronic gadgets were once not so common and pretty unheard of. Now days every other person has one or several of them.
Firstly, what I mean by personal digital devices are any kind of electronic digital device that we automatically take with us wherever we go without much thought. I won't make a comprehensive list but the things I'm talking about include portable music players, cell phones, PDAs, pagers, etc. Especially cellular telephones- no actual physical object that people choose to leave their place of residence with every single day has exploded in the past decade more than cell phones. I personally have not met a human over the age of 10 years (some even younger) who does not own a cell phone in the past ten years.
If you live in a first-world country and do not believe that the increase in cell phone or personal digital devices has actually happened, you can go ahead and leave a comment here with statistics or evidence that proves so, otherwise I will continue under the assumption that the overwhelming (80% or higher) majority of people in first world countries owns a cell phone.
These little things, in my opinion, are the epitome of a remediated object. In accordance with my observations, the purpose and application of a cell phone has changed in many ways since their inception in the daily lives of all of us. They used to be very large and scarcely "portable." While they very much were portable, the definition of portability in and of itself has been redefined by modern standards- at least in the realm of cell phones. They were bulky (think: several times larger than any cell phone you can purchase today) and designed for making calls. Yep, that was it. You dialed a number and placed your call.
Today, a cell phone offers endless amounts of features that no simple text-entry like this one can list in their entirety. They come in a plethora of different configurations- touch screens, clamshell folding (flip-phones), full-qwerty keyboards with track balls, and any combination thereof. They're a fraction of the size they used to be and communicate in far more ways than just placing calls. Text messaging between cell phones has almost replaced calling as the primary means of communication between cell phones.
This makes their implication much different. Ten years ago cell phone coverage was, I hate to use the expression yet again, but a fraction of what it is now. When you look at the advertised coverage network of say Verizon or AT&T, the two major cell phone service companies that come to mind, more square miles are covered on the map of America than not. Few places in this country don't have cell phone service, in other words. Therefore, having a cell phone ten years ago was a pretty unnecessary luxury, I mean even if you decided to put up the money to buy into it, you still didn't have that much coverage! You could sometimes make a call while out and about, and that offered a convenience.
Today, when just about anywhere you can think of going in this country provides cell phone service, it's almost unheard of to not own one. Seeing as how most people have one, the common assumption is that people have cell phones and it's totally transformed from a luxury to almost something of necessity. It's simply assumed in America that a common adult who has a salary or parents who have a salary owns a cell phone.
As for their remediation- their entire purpose in society has changed. The transformation from a luxury to a necessity is a part of it, but so too is the opportunity owning a cell phone allows you. No longer can you merely place calls, and only in certain areas, but now you can send quick text messages and digital files to just about anyone in the country (or on the continent!) and have them receive it nearly instantly. Now you can browse the internet in its full glory at the touch of a button anywhere. Now you can download and install any of millions of portable device applications on your cell phone that do anything from allowing you to use your cell phone as a compass to gaming to video-cam chatting with someone on the opposite coast from you. This is all part of the way we see cell phones, as a device that allows us to plug into a greater network of people that reaches far beyond ourselves- and do it effortlessly, on the go, cost effectively, and instantly. It's much different than the ways of old where we could sometimes be able to call someone if we were outside of the house.
That is the very definition of remediation- improving media in leaps and bounds to the point where old media is left as an afterthought, improving it by the implications of what it can do versus what the old media can't. Cell phones and what they mean for us has been reformed entirely in the past decade.
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