Since when don’t you take out your wallet to take some cash and pay whatever? In my case, I just take my wallet to take my ID when I need it. So, I thought it was a good idea to reflect on this. Today I’m going to talk about payments that we make with our devices and their consequences.
Trends change and technology comes into our lives to make it easier, we just need to use them correctly. It is really easy when you go to the university café shop and buy a latte macchiato; you just bring up your phone and bring it closer to the card reader. You don’t have to open your bag, take your wallet, count the coins, and give them to the waiter. Yes, this is true that is easier, but we are getting used to this and does it have good or bad consequences?
Consequences
I would say it has advantages and disadvantages. For example, it is easier, and faster to pay, and you don’t need to bring your wallet to every place you go. Sometimes when I am in a rush and I go out with a bag different from yesterday’s I forget my wallet is in the other one so I don’t have it when I’m out, but there is no problem, I still have money and can pay everything with my phone.
But talking now about the disadvantages one related to what I just mentioned that comes to my mind is that you don’t realize how much money you are paying. You don’t have cash so you don’t realize how much money are you spending a day, I used to go out with an amount of cash money and then I couldn’t waste more because I literally didn’t have more, another one is when we bring our device closer to the card reader; when I pay with my credit card I have to enter my pin code, however, when I pay with my phone I authorize the payment with my face id, and there was a day that I was buying a water bottle that was 1 euro, I ended paying 100 euros because the man in the shop pressed the zeros unconsciously. I pressed to pay, my phone recognized my face, and I didn’t see the card reader screen, so I didn’t realize, I just saw the notification on my phone, and I told him, so he gave me 99 euros back. This was me being lost in that moment and the guy was nice to me, but this can happen to anyone anytime wherever. There are these devices that people bring near purses and activate the contactless payment of any device you may have ad can be your smart watch, phone, tablet…
You can also run out of battery and then you don’t have any way to pay for whatever, this can be life-saving because you might have to take public transport and don’t have money, or if you have to buy some urgent medicines you also can’t do it because, again, your phone is dead, as these may examples come to my mind.
So, yeah contactless payment with your phone is advantageous but it’s not, you just have to use it carefully and always have some cash with you, just in case something happens.
I always pay with my phone due to the convenience, but you are right.. if my phone ever runs out of battery, I would have no way to pay. So I will keep a bit of cash with me from now on just in case of an emergency!
I think that contactless payment was one of those things that made me realize “woah our phone is actually starting to become our entire life” but at the same thing, it was so seamless that I barely even realized until I thought about it.
In recent weeks, we have discussed in the groups the conscious integration of AI in our daily lives and this avalanche of new technologies coming our way but this makes me wonder if it will be kind of the same thing. If it is going to feel so effortless and convenient that there is not even space to be critical about it…
Contactless phone payment definitely feels less material than paying with card or cash. I’ve heard jokes about how paying with your phone is like using monopoly money because the money you spend just doesn’t feel consequential & that feels true to life for me at least. There’s also something to be said for the way that I have a similar feeling about cash though not to the same extent- for some reason I’m like once it’s out of my bank account (which I check digitally) it’s already gone and I don’t feel as frugal. I think this comes from the fact that where I lived before moving here we barely used cash at all. Because of this I think my brain has become wired to think of money as something in the digital realm, but it’s still useful for me to have a physical card in the real world dedicated to spending that isn’t also used for social networking and streaming and everything else in the world. Super interesting topic! It’s something I think about a lot but never really connected it to digital media in my head.