• by Mark Emery , November 9, 2011

She's the woman next to you in line at the grocery store -- the one with the full cart standing next to an empty conveyor belt, holding everybody up while she chuckles at her iPhone. Chances are nobody is particularly agitated, because everyone else is probably engaged in some minor variation of pretty much the exact same thing.

He's the guy in the sedan in front of you who missed the light turning green because he is reading responses to a post he made in a gardening forum -- and will check 19 more times today. There are no honks and certainly no fingers, because all hands are busy. Busy typing. Busy swiping and scrolling. Busy with slingshots and cranky winged vertebrates and words-they-don’t-know-the-meaning-of with friends. Busy checking in. Busy tweeting out. And very busy searching around.

But let's face it -- it's not him. And it isn't her, either. It is you. And it is me. And even if you're polite enough to not do it in line at Publix, or safe enough to keep both hands on the wheel during your commute (yay Bluetooth!), chances are you're one of the millions who kisses the wife goodnight on the forehead before rolling over to read Amazon reviews on your Android.

After all, new science suggests the closest emotion we have for our smartphones is -- hold on to your Bluetooth dongles -- actual love. 

It's cliché to say we are a distracted people. It is cheap to complain about how our digital lives can lay waste to our personal ones. And it is a sine dicendo to say that when we can't get what we want, when we want it, at the price we want, and where we want it, we are prone to hysterics. But have you even looked in the mirror when you've been even remotely frustrated with something lately? Does it look anything like this?

If you're like me, it does. And if you're like me, it is rooted in the fact that you're not used to not getting your way -- at least on the millions of harmless little things that, in total, comprise the bulk of our daily existence. After all, you listen to the music you want. You read the articles your highly personalized RSS feed filters down to you. You read the books read by 62.9% of people who have read the same book you're reading now. You probably don't know anyone who doesn't believe ___ about ___, and if you do, you hid their status updates on Facebook a long time ago.

We choose everything, and it is easy to at least feel like we are in control. Is it any wonder that we are so quick to lose our marbles on the rare occasion where our carefully curated daily oyster is in any way shucked?

If this is starting to sound like a rant, it isn’t -- technology can bring out the best in us. Despite what you may read about disenfranchised citizens, voter turnout has risen dramatically over the last 15 years, in virtual lockstep with the dawn of the digital era. And while it's true that each generation is typically more liberal than the one that precedes it, millennials are going much, much further, pouring gasoline on the otherwise slow burn of social inequity. They abhor dogma, value good parenting over good marriages, and are GLBT-friendly.

The same mobile devices used to tune in to the Arab Spring are laying the foundation for an American Winter -- where technology is connecting groundswells of people fed up with growing economic disparity.

On a more practical note, people who own tablets read more than they ever have before. And pretty much everyone is buying tablets. It's too easy to make the case that technology in general -- and mobile technology in particular -- has woven us together in awesome ways that never before existed to get too righteous about the fact that there are a few burn marks and dangling threads in the quilt.

So, no -- this isn’t a rant.

It is an invitation. An invitation to real, ground-breaking innovation in the mobile channel. An invitation to smart developers, brands and interactive advertising agencies otherwise engaged in making things incrementally easier to find, more viewer-friendly, or faster to buy to look at the mobile device differently. It’s an invitation to marketers to stop high-fiving each other over miniscule upticks in mobile conversion rates and start paying attention to the legions of people that come to your mobile site/download with a mobile application and leave almost immediately, completely unsatisfied.

It is an invitation to think that the best way to break through the clutter of Groupon, Facebook, Scrabble and Gilt Group isn’t Scoutmob, Google +, Angry Birds and Rue La La. It isn’t investing heavily in making your business easy to locate (come on -- when was the last time you had any difficulty whatsoever finding things with a smartphone?). It isn’t even “making your Web site mobile friendly,” which is what every single mobile focus group is designed to get people to say.

It is an invitation to at least humor the idea that you have to understand a person before you can market to a consumer.

Finally, it is an invitation to people to view spontaneity as something to be relished, not feared. One of my favorite high school teachers once told me to write a report on a book written by an author I thought was most unlike me -- a lily-white, relatively sheltered teenager on Cape Cod, Mass. I chose “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. 

Challenging worldviews shouldn’t be the exclusive domain of high school English teachers in rural New England. It should be a key goal for mobile marketers and technologists across the globe.