Are Mobile Phones Disconnecting Us From Geographic Location?
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
