here is an observation i made about mass effect and omnitools, i'd love to hear your thoughts. so omnitools are like hyperadvanced phones and can do so much, so why do you not see omnitool-addicted citizens around the citadel the same way you see masses of people staring into a rectangle in public (aka smartphones)? is there a social stigma? is tech more productivity focused? what do you think?
The boring answer is that Mass Effect was conceived in the early 2000s when smartphones weren't ubiquitous. ;) The same way social media are never mentioned.
But going forward, for omni-tools, we can imagine a series of possible reasons : mostly, screen "addiction" IRL is a relatively recent phenomenon, historically speaking ; in various countries, legislation is only just starting to get implemented to counter the problem, often in ways that are blunt, ineffective or counter-productive. But the internet wouldn't be a new invention for any of the species in the setting, humans included : by ME1, the invention of the internet is further from Shep and the gang than the invention of the radio and the TV are from us. But for non-humans, the local invention of the internet probably dates back thousands of years. How, then, might the various societies of the setting have adapted ?
The answer will vary depending on how utopian or dystopian you think the constituent societies of the Mass Effect universe are (and how that has varied over the centuries). Personally, I'd love to tell you there's strict multi-species legislation that protects people from corporations and various attention-grabbing and addiction-inducing features, but given that, in-universe, programs grab your personal information and data the moment you walk anywhere and immediately starts spewing personalized commercials to maximize the odds you'll spend your money on the company, I find the notion that the best interests of the common people are protected from corporations unlikely.
So I guess my answer would be cultural : at some point, some group somewhere (a young generation ?) decided that getting stuck to a screen all day was decidedly uncool, which broke the camel's back and allowed into the forefront of social discourse a variety of actors and NGOs who had spent much of their lives campaigning against that very issue, cue new cultural hegemony : if you can't take your eyes off your omni-tool, you're cringe.
More seriously, every part of a society tends to reflect, to some extent, the other parts, revealing its values : you might argue that the Alliance's use of liberal democracy is a reflection of its commitment to free market capitalism, as the customers voters are expected to buy elect one of the products candidates on the great electoral market (and that is the end of their political action, come back in a few years). One of the biases at the heart of liberal democracies (at least at their inception, around the 18th-19th centuries) is that they tend to assume that every individual in a state is like a free-floating atom, when in fact each individual is caught in larger groups with larger interests, some of them conflicting — and crucially, not all people in a state are as equally powerful even if they are equal under the law (i.e. some people have disproportionately more resources at their disposal and can use those to disproportionately exert their influence to suit their ends, and the legal and socio-economic tissue progressively shapes itself around their "gravity well", so to speak). This has tended to result in "blindspots" when it comes to protecting individuals or groups from different individuals or groups when, on paper, they have the same rights, but in practice they do not have the same power at all. (This is a gross over-simplification.)
But do the people outside of the Alliance share this political history and general ideology ?
Evidently no : the Turian Hierarchy consider the idea of equality laughable and their ideology is one of state consequentialism (i.e. what's good is what benefits the state the most for the longest time), but they also assume that citizens must take their personal responsibilities themselves ; the Batarian Hegemony also considers the idea of equality laughable, though its version of non-egalitarianism is postulated on a hierarchy of various in-groups (the castes) which are themselves supposed to be biologically superior to an out-group medley (non-batarians, because of racism) ; the salarians of the Salarian Union consider their loyalty is first to the first circle of their bloodline and decreases from there, which suggests they view society and social success as zero-sum games, where everyone is in competition all the time and the victory of one entails another's loss ; etc.
All of this to say I strongly suspect the legal framework for omni-tool use and abuse would not be identical in the various non-Alliance polities to what the Alliance (i.e. Shep) endures, though there would be commonalities (they're all a global interconnected society with similar structures, after all). But the particulars I'll leave to your imagination. ;)
(Because frankly it's a monumental task and I'm lazy.)
