Are Mobile Phones Disconnecting Us From Geographic Location?

from the is-that-a-bad-thing? dept

Tue, Nov 18th 2003 1:48am — Mike Masnick

It's happened to most of us, I'm sure. You're traveling somewhere, and you receive a phone call on your mobile phone, and you explain to the person that you're not in your hometown, but 3,000 miles away. An architecture critic is now complaining that the real problem with mobile phone use in public isn't that it bugs other people, but that it removes our sense of place and removes us from connecting with the location we're actually in at the moment. He's particularly upset that people walking around talking on their mobile phones aren't "experiencing" the urban landscape around them (no surprise that this comes from an architecture critic, whose very job is to notice the urban landscape around him). Instead, he complains that we're barely connected to our physical location, and quick to jump to the virtual location of our mobile phones. Of course, even if he's right, I wonder if that's such a terrible thing. No one is being forced to ignore their surroundings - and if the mobile phone opens up new or different landscapes around them (real or virtual) all it's doing is adding more options. Found via Gizmodo.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

4 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

dorpus, 18 Nov 2003 @ 3:11am

The Post-Tourism Era?
During the 20th century, people assumed that tourism would increase forever. Tourism has made its sales pitch based on the notion of cultural or natural authenticity -- that people should experience locations that supposedly offer a more "authentic" experience to connect people to the past or to nature, as a counterpoint to sterile modern life.

Increasingly, we're in an era when cultural or natural monuments are packed full of ringing cell phones, other tourists, and sleazy gift shops. Does travelling some place really make someone a more sophisticated, better person, or is he just following the herd? Is it possible that one can learn far more about history or nature by reading, instead of taking pictures at some dirty monument? If Al Qaeda were to blow up some monument tomorrow, how many fat tourists wearing tacky hats will fall into the sea?

[ link to this | view in chronology ]
aNonMooseCowherd, 18 Nov 2003 @ 8:08am

cell phones
I supposed the architects will band together with the tourism industry and get a law passed that requires cell phones that are used outside of their base location to play an announcement every 30 seconds saying "Enjoy Paris!" or whatever city they happen to be in.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Sue, 18 Nov 2003 @ 10:30am

Never mind the place, what about the people?
This doesn't touch on the problem that along with a sense of place, we've lost a sense of the people around us because we're not really "there" while we're marching around with our phones to our ears. No wonder we feel a lack of community.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 19 Nov 2003 @ 2:14am
  
  Re: Never mind the place, what about the people?
  All this and backache too!
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]