The Challenges of Life in the Cloud

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, offered a memorable description of “cloud computing” in 2006.

Smartphones and the mobile Internet have become ubiquitous in Taiwan. Nearly everywhere you go, you see pedestrians checking out their phones or playing around on a tablet.

At Google’s Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Schmidt introduced the concept of “cloud servers” and offered a business model for their use: “What’s interesting... is that there is an emergent new model.... It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing—they should be in a ‘cloud’ somewhere. And that if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn’t matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you... you can get access to the cloud.”

Over the last couple of years, the growing ubiquity of mobile devices like smartphones has translated into growing numbers of services, free and otherwise, that can be used on virtually any device. The most familiar variety of these are applications software, better known as “apps.”

By the end of 2012, users had downloaded more than 40 billion apps from Apple and Google, and this figure is still rising. In fact, Apple recently reported that as of January 2013 its iOS App Store had itself seen more than 40 billion downloads.

The combination of mobile hardware and cloud-based services has changed lifestyles in ways that have made some kinds of work more efficient.

When friends get together in a restaurant, they often take pictures, post them to Facebook, and check in before tucking into their food. In fact, such behavior is perfectly acceptable in the mobile Internet era.

Mr. Li, a 36-year-old insurance salesman with more than 300 clients, is a case in point. He says that prior to 2000, it used to take him at least four meetings to go from the initial contact with a client to completing an insurance contract, with the back and forth over the terms of the contract taking an average of two to four weeks to sort out.

But there have been huge changes for the better in the last two or three years. Li can now pull out his iPad, connect to the cloud, bring up the contract, and run through it with a client in their first meeting. If the client is happy with it, they can sign it that day.

Li says that smart services are a growing trend in the insurance industry. He explains that roughly 40 of the 50 people in his office are now using tablets, and that everyone also has a smartphone with them at all times.

Sean Tseng, an Apple-certified help desk specialist who works from his home, is another person taking advantage of the cloud to make his working life easier. Tseng is especially fond of Drop­box, a cloud-based drive that not only provides storage but also allows users to upload, revise, and exchange files. He says that he used to have to worry about whether he’d saved files or had copies on his person when he went out. Having Drop­box as a backup has greatly reduced his stress levels.

“When I save a file to Drop­box, it’s in the cloud,” he says. “Cloud-services companies have backups, so I don’t have to worry about a file getting lost or corrupted.”

With technologies tailored to human needs, the cloud holds the promise of a better life.

But the cloud-based life gives rise to problems of its own. Parents in particular have a hard time with their children being glued to their smartphones during family meals. They say their children are distant and impolite, and blame smartphones for their kids’ inattention. Some parents have even gone so far as to bar their children from using smartphones at all.

Speaking to this issue, Wu Chyi-in, a research fellow with Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, says that the problem isn’t with cellphones themselves but rather with the parent-child relationship. He argues that these children are simply ignoring their parents because they don’t get along with them.

Tsai Chih-hao, a user-experience consultant with User­Xper Digital Consulting and the author of Start by Addressing the Problems, views the issue from a more psychological angle. He says that blaming phones is a mistake. Instead, he argues that in addition to wanting to escape poor parent-child relationships, teens bury themselves in their phones because they have a greater need for social interaction than adults. Nowadays, things like Face­book and chat apps are their channels of choice for the regular contact that they seek with their friends.

Mario Yang, a child of the 80s and the author of iPhones Are for Breakups, Face­book Is for Getting Back Together, has an interesting take of his own. He suggests that there are parallels between the feelings of parents of this generation towards smartphones and of the previous towards television.

Yang argues that parents today don’t want their kids playing with smartphones, but at the same time rely on smartphones to keep them amused. It’s analogous to how the parents of 30 years ago didn’t want their kids eating in front of the TV, but used the TV as a pacifier while mothers were preparing meals.

“Life doesn’t change,” says Yang. “Only the tools do.”

But can the rapid pace of change in communications technology and devices affect or even change human nature?

Tsai stresses that human nature doesn’t change quickly. But with new technologies and devices taking the stage every year, the challenges we face in adapting to changes in our environment become ever larger.

He cites the older generation in a family learning to use an iPad to look up information or What’s App to send photos as examples. Tsai argues that technology’s challenges put people back in touch with human nature, in particular their ability to learn and their curiosity about new things.

“Unfortunately,” he laments, “curiosity and learning are ground out of us by mainstream education.”

Many elementary and middle-school teachers see smartphones as a scourge and have consequently missed an opportunity to teach their students how to use our new mobile devices properly.

Wu, who has long followed issues in teen education, has found that teens use their smartphones primarily for Face­book and to download games. Very few use their smartphones and tablets for study outside of school hours.

Middle-school teachers are very unhappy to see students bringing smartphones to school because they fear the phones will distract the kids in class. But with smartphones becoming as ubiquitous as watches, can schools ban them effectively?

Tsai says that if classes were interesting enough, students wouldn’t be as inclined to pull out their phones. “This is an opportunity for teachers to grow, to find a way to make education more lively and interesting.”

Tsai and Wu both suggest that elementary and middle-school teachers would be better served by incorporating smartphones into their curricula than by treating them as the enemy.

Technological progress is so rapid that it’s giving new a meaning to the word “generation.” People in their 30s and 40s today who were part of the “MSN generation” can’t help but feel that we’ve moved into an era when “generations are defined by the tools they use.” As an example, Yang notes that “gamers” used to refer to people who played games on a gaming console, but now includes people who play games on their smart­phones or tablets. According to this criterion, the generation that uses mobile devices to access the Internet on the fly is the cloud generation.

In a pamphlet entitled Cloud Culture: The Future of Global Cultural Relations, prepared for the British Council, Charles Leadbeater, a former reporter with the Financial Times and the author of We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity, notes that the Internet has taken many forms over the years, and argues that the decade following Web 2.0 will belong to the cloud. So what comes after the cloud?

“In the next 10 years,” he writes, “cloud computing will give rise to something new again, cloud culture and even cloud capitalism.” How are we to address this decadal change? Leadbeater says only: “The future of the web is still uncertain.”

As Japanese author Ha­ruki Mu­ra­kami noted when discussing the switch from writing with pen and paper to writing on a computer, technological change isn’t in itself good or bad, acceptable or not, but simply lived reality. Should we credulously believe new technology’s constant promises to bring us a beautiful new world, accepting that these wonders are in reach and leaping to the chase? Or should we instead put them to use achieving our own aims? These are crucial questions in the cloud era.