Disconnected Urbanism

"There is a connection between the idea of place and the reality of cellular telephones. It is not encouraging...Even when you are in a place that retains its intensity, its specialness, and its ability to confer a defining context on your life, it doesn't have the all-consuming effect these places used to. You no longer feel that being in one place cuts you off from other places...When you walk along the street and talk on a cell phone, you are not on the street sharing the communal experience of urban life...the meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished...Now calling across the street and calling from New York to California or even Europe are precisely the same thing. They cost the same because to the phone they are the same. Every place is exactly the same as every other place. They are all just nodes on a network--and so, increasingly, are we."

Thanks to Julie Taraska