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4/30/14

Cellular Technology: The Word Exchange (or when smartphones attack)

The effects of smartphone use on everyday life - parenting, friendship, walking, driving, wayfinding - are both scientifically measurable and anecdotally visible. Many people will ruefully acknowledge that they've forgotten how to read a map, or how to wait in line without checking Twitter. The smartphone's sudden omnipresence makes it a great device for science fiction. What, writers have begun to ask, will our phones offer to do for us next? And how will we react?

Alena Graedon's dazzling but unsatisfying debut novel The Word Exchange sketches a smartphone hater's worst nightmare. It offers a snappy, noir-inflected vision of a future New York suffering from an epidemic of aphasia brought on by super-smartphones. Against the spreading sickness, an employee of one of the last surviving print dictionaries struggles to find her missing father and to uncover the shadowy evildoers whose profit-grabbing has resulted in this dangerous "word flu."

The Meme - the smartphone that seems to have annexed all of the market share in this version of New York - can dispense medicine, hail you a cab, pay your taxes, scan you through the turnstile in the subway, manage traffic, and call 911 when you're in trouble. In social situations, the device advises you what to say next and when to shut up, stays quiet if it senses somebody in a group is hostile to its presence, or saucily beams your contact information into an attractive stranger's Meme.

 If you're willing to implant a microchip in your head, the Meme can offer a new level of service. The next-generation Nautilus, a biotech device that partners with the user's DNA, promises even more.

Read more: The Word Exchange (or when smartphones attack) | Stuff.co.nz

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