Next time you hear the xylophone chirp of the iPhone ringtone on a busy train or bus, watch how many people take out their phone to see if they're the one being called.
We all have the same ringtone, which slightly defeats the point of a ringtone.
But it seems to fit a narrative of dull conformity: all of us pawing slack-jawed, stoop-necked at the same black rectangular slabs.
In a more colourful age, the personalised ringtone ruled. The fact it no longer does tells us about how technology has changed over the last decade, and how we've changed with it.
Back in the late 1990s and mid-2000s, there was of course another ubiquitous ringtone - Nokia's, mocked on Trigger Happy TV. An unfair fate for a classical score originally composed in 1902.
But a million personalised versions also bloomed.
I spent many of my teenage hours on Nokia Composer, a program built into the 3210 and 3310, recreating songs in bleep form using the phone's keypad. (Yes, this was extremely dorky. Here's how the start of Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal went: 8a1 16a1 16a1 16g1 16a1.)
For those less dedicated to ringtone craft, you could download ringtones via text - and it was big business. In 2005, ringtone sales worldwide were worth $4.4bn (£3.5bn), according to Billboard.
Phones packed more features in, going beyond the bleeps into full, glorious polyphony and then, finally, into "realtones" or "truetones".
Madonna even released a song - Hung Up - as a 30-second truetone before she put it out as a single.
The disgusting culmination of all this was of course Crazy Frog, the priapic advertising sensation released upon the public by ringtone maker Jamba.
Ringtones were a way of expressing identity. If you had Crazy Frog, for instance, you were clearly a serial killer. A 2008 study by psychologists at Aalto University in Helsinki, though, found that personalising phones supported the need for "relatedness" - humans' basic desire to connect with and care for each other.
But 2005 was the high watermark for ringtone sales. They dwindled away. PRS, the music licensing society, no longer includes ringtones in its annual financial reports for the industry.
The fault was less Crazy Frog's than Madonna's, though. Hung Up was incorporated into the marketing for the Motorola Rokr phone, a collaboration with Apple. Steve Jobs was so appalled by the device that he went and made the iPhone instead, in 2007.
The iPhone killed the ringtone, even though it made downloading ringtones and songs easier than ever before, for two reasons.
First, we stopped making calls. In 2004, the average person spent 227 minutes making calls on their mobile each month, according to Ofcom. Last year, it was only 182 minutes on the blower. We text and WhatsApp instead.
Second, iPhones gave us plenty of other ways to waste our time - games, music and a whole world of apps. Less time for Nokia Composer.
But what's less important here isn't the opportunity for distraction - ample though that may be - but that apps now let users express their identity much better.
In 2014, researchers from Imperial College investigated how we make our phones 'ours'. They wrote: "Collecting contacts, photographs, videos and other information were all tasks that made a phone unique to one user."
One subject told them: "Look at these two phones," referring to his iPhone 4S and an iPhone 4S owned by one of the authors. "They are identical unless you turn them on."
Apps like Snapchat and Instagram turbocharge that same process.
We all carry the same black rectangles around, with the same ringtone.
But they let us express our identity much better than we could in the heady days of phone personalisation.
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