A2 · Elementary
9 min
technologyculturemediadaily life
Before You Even Get Up
Despiertos antes que el sol
The smartphone rewired how we live, sleep, get our news, and connect with each other, and it all happened in under twenty years. Fletcher and Octavio debate what we gained, what we lost, and who actually controls what we see.
El teléfono inteligente cambió cómo vivimos, dormimos, nos informamos y nos relacionamos, y todo ocurrió en menos de veinte años. Fletcher y Octavio debaten qué ganamos, qué perdimos y quién controla realmente lo que vemos.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| el teléfono | the phone | El teléfono está siempre cerca. |
| el mapa | the map | Yo no uso mapas de papel. |
| la mentira | the lie | La mentira viaja muy rápido en internet. |
| filmar | to film / to record | La gente filma todo con el teléfono. |
| la regla | the rule | Tengo una regla: no teléfonos en la mesa. |
| el algoritmo | the algorithm | El algoritmo decide qué ves en el teléfono. |
Before I got out of bed this morning, I had checked my phone four times.
Four.
I wasn't looking for anything.
There was nothing urgent.
I just picked it up like a reflex, the way you'd scratch an itch.
Yo también.
Me too.
El teléfono está siempre cerca.
The phone is always nearby.
Es normal ahora.
It's normal now.
That word, normal, is exactly what gets me.
Because this wasn't normal fifteen years ago.
There was no smartphone habit to break, no blue light keeping you awake, no algorithm deciding what you woke up thinking about.
Antes, la gente se despierta y toma café.
Before, people wake up and have coffee.
Ahora, primero el teléfono.
Now, first the phone.
Right.
And I want to try to understand how that shift happened so fast, because we're talking about a genuinely compressed timeline here.
The first iPhone launched in 2007.
By 2015 half the planet had a smartphone.
That's a speed of adoption that has basically no historical parallel.
La televisión tarda más años.
The television took more years.
El teléfono llega muy rápido.
The phone arrived very fast.
TV took about thirteen years to reach fifty million users in the US alone.
The smartphone hit a billion globally in about a decade.
And those aren't equivalent things, because a smartphone isn't one device replacing another.
It's twenty devices collapsing into one.
El teléfono es una cámara.
The phone is a camera.
Es un mapa.
It's a map.
Es un banco.
It's a bank.
Es música.
It's music.
Exactly that list.
And each one of those things was previously its own industry, its own set of habits, its own physical object you carried around.
I used to carry a camera, a notebook, a street map, a dictionary when I was reporting abroad.
That whole bag of things is now one rectangle in my pocket.
Mis hijos no usan mapas de papel.
My kids don't use paper maps.
Ellos no saben usarlos.
They don't know how to use them.
And honestly, neither do I anymore, which unsettles me a little.
I spent years navigating cities without GPS.
Now if my phone dies in a foreign city I feel genuinely lost in a way I didn't used to.
The skill atrophied.
I outsourced it and forgot to keep it.
Pero hay algo más grande.
But there's something bigger.
En África, el teléfono es el banco.
In Africa, the phone is the bank.
Tell me more about that, because I think this is one of the parts of the story that people in wealthy countries genuinely miss.
Muchas personas no tienen un banco.
Many people don't have a bank.
Pero tienen un teléfono.
But they have a phone.
Pagan con el teléfono.
They pay with the phone.
This is a real phenomenon, not a minor one.
M-Pesa in Kenya launched in 2007, the same year as the iPhone, and it let people transfer money by SMS on basic handsets.
By 2013 roughly forty percent of Kenya's GDP was flowing through it.
People who had never had a bank account were saving, paying, sending money home, all through a device.
Para estas personas, el teléfono es muy importante.
For these people, the phone is very important.
Es más que una cámara.
It's more than a camera.
It's infrastructure.
In some places the smartphone didn't just change daily life, it created daily life as we understand it economically.
Access to markets, to healthcare information, to weather forecasts for farmers.
The phone skipped entire generations of development.
Pero en España también cambia mucho.
But in Spain it also changes a lot.
La gente no habla en el metro.
People don't talk on the metro.
The silent metro car.
Every city in the world has this now.
I remember taking the metro in Buenos Aires in the nineties and there was noise, conversation, people watching each other.
Go now and everyone is looking down.
It's the same posture in Tokyo, in Madrid, in Austin.
No es malo siempre.
It's not always bad.
A veces las personas leen.
Sometimes people read.
O escuchan música.
Or they listen to music.
That's a fair pushback, and I don't want to be the guy who romanticizes forced small talk with strangers.
But there's research, a fair amount of it, suggesting that the specific design of social media apps, the scroll, the notification, the like count, is engineered to capture attention in a way that a book genuinely is not.
Los niños tienen el teléfono muy jóvenes.
Children have the phone very young.
Esto es un problema grande.
This is a big problem.
I see it in my students at UT.
These are smart, motivated twenty-year-olds, and a ten-second silence in a seminar room makes them reach for their phones almost involuntarily.
The tolerance for sitting with a thought, just sitting with it, has gotten shorter.
That worries me as an educator.
En las familias, las personas comen y miran el teléfono.
In families, people eat and look at the phone.
No hablan.
They don't talk.
The dinner table thing.
Look, I have been guilty of this.
My daughter called me out on it at Christmas.
We were having a conversation and I just, mid-sentence, picked up my phone to check something.
She gave me a look that I am not going to forget.
Yo tengo una regla en casa.
I have a rule at home.
No teléfonos en la mesa.
No phones at the table.
Es importante.
It's important.
Though I noticed you checked yours twice before we started recording today.
Eso es diferente.
That's different.
Yo trabajo.
I'm working.
La regla es para la familia.
The rule is for the family.
Incredibly convenient distinction.
But let's talk about the journalism angle, because this is where it gets personal for me.
The smartphone didn't just change how people consume news.
It changed what news is, who makes it, how fast it moves, and whether any of it can be trusted.
La noticia llega muy rápido ahora.
The news arrives very fast now.
Pero a veces la noticia no es verdad.
But sometimes the news is not true.
That tension is real and it has professional consequences.
In 2013, when the Boston Marathon bombing happened, Reddit users identified the wrong suspect and that name spread through Twitter and onto cable news in under an hour.
An innocent family's life got turned upside down.
That could not have happened with the information velocity of 1995.
Antes, el periódico espera un día.
Before, the newspaper waited a day.
Ahora, la mentira viaja en un segundo.
Now, the lie travels in a second.
And yet, and I want to hold both things at once here, the smartphone also gave us footage of things that power would have preferred to keep invisible.
I've thought about this a lot.
George Floyd, the Arab Spring, protests in Iran.
In every one of those cases ordinary people with phones in their pockets became witnesses in a way no previous technology allowed.
La gente filma todo ahora.
People film everything now.
Esto es bueno y malo al mismo tiempo.
This is good and bad at the same time.
Good and bad at the same time is maybe the most honest summary of every single thing we've talked about today.
But I want to push on one more layer, which is the question of who decides what you see.
Because the camera is yours, the phone is yours, but the feed is not yours.
Los algoritmos deciden qué ves.
The algorithms decide what you see.
No tú.
Not you.
Eso es un problema.
That is a problem.
It really is.
You open Instagram or TikTok and you think you're browsing freely, but what you're actually doing is walking through a corridor that someone built for you, based on what kept you there longest last time.
The phone is yours but the attention it harvests is theirs.
And most people, myself included, accepted those terms without reading them.
Y hay otra cosa.
And there's another thing.
Yo miro el teléfono en la cama.
I look at the phone in bed.
No duermo bien.
I don't sleep well.
The sleep disruption is so well documented at this point that it almost feels quaint to mention it, but it's worth saying plainly: the blue light from screens suppresses melatonin, and checking email or news before sleep means your brain is processing stress signals right before it's supposed to shut down.
We designed a device that is almost perfectly calibrated to undermine sleep, and then we put it on our nightstands.
Sí.
Yes.
Pero yo no puedo cambiar.
But I can't change.
El teléfono está en mi vida.
The phone is in my life.
Es así.
That's how it is.
That honesty is actually the thing I find most interesting about this whole conversation.
We know, most of us know, about the attention design, the sleep, the misinformation, the way it makes us reach without thinking.
And we use it anyway.
That's not weakness, it's a real signal about how embedded this thing has become in how we live.
Oye, tú dices mucho la palabra algoritmo.
Hey, you say the word algorithm a lot.
Sabes de dónde viene, Fletcher?
Do you know where it comes from, Fletcher?
I do not.
I assumed it was some sixties computer science term.
Am I about to be educated?
Algoritmo viene del árabe.
Algorithm comes from Arabic.
Es un nombre, Al-Juarismi.
It's a name, Al-Khwarizmi.
Es un matemático muy viejo.
He's a very old mathematician.
Wait, genuinely wait.
The word we use for the thing that runs our social media feeds, that decides what news we see, that shapes modern digital life, that word traces back to a ninth-century Islamic scholar named Al-Khwarizmi.
And the word algebra comes from him too, I believe.
Sí, álgebra también.
Yes, algebra too.
El árabe es muy importante para las matemáticas.
Arabic is very important for mathematics.
Y para tu teléfono.
And for your phone.
So every time I complain about the algorithm deciding what I read for breakfast, I'm accidentally invoking a medieval Baghdad mathematician.
I love that.
That's the footnote nobody puts in the TED talk.
Octavio, you never let me leave a conversation knowing the same amount I came in with.