WHEN I started writing this article, I was planning to write about how smart phones are changing the way we use the internet, but I soon came to realise that they are changing far more than that. In fact I’d go as far as to say mobile technology is changing our very culture.

Perhaps, it’s the size, the user experience, or just the convenience of smart phones that is fast making them the most popular way of connecting to the internet.

Whatever the reason though, there are now more mobiles with smart phone capabilities than not, and it’s estimated that by 2014 there will be more smart phones than desktop PCs.

A major difference between smart phones and other phones of course is location-awareness, the ability of a phone to know where it is, and to communicate that to your friends over the internet.

For many young people this fundamentally changes the way they organise their social lives. It also means that technology can be used to organise protests, demonstrations and political rallies in response to current events like never before.

In many ways the world seems to be becoming a smaller place and the speed at which we receive news from around the globe is rapidly increasing, with photographs, messages and video footage from smart phones often reaching us hours before they are reported on by the broadcast media.

In fact, today there are now more smart phones than there are radios or televisions in the UK, so it’s hardly surprising that as many as 40% of us are now using our phone to access the news.

The attitude towards using phones in public also seems to be changing. It’s now increasingly common to see people accessing the internet during meetings to look up up-to-date information and check facts and figures.

Even cinemas are no longer asking people to turn their phones off, but instead requesting they be put on silent, allowing cinema goers to use their mobiles to comment on the movie or interact with friends as part of their viewing experience.

Language hasn’t been spared the influence of the smart phones either. It’s commonplace to see acronyms, shortened words and altered spellings that originated in text, chat and status updates becoming part of our everyday language.

No matter what your view on smartphones, one thing is for sure. As they slowly become a bigger part of our daily lives, they are more and more likely to continue to shape our culture.

:: David Coxon is IT manager at the Baltic centre for contemporary art