Disconnected Urbanism

Metropolis Magazine is running a good piece on the disconnection we suffer from the places in which we exist, caused by mobile phones:

The great offense of the cell phone in public is not the intrusion of its ring, although that can be infuriating when it interrupts a tranquil moment. It is the fact that even when the phone does not ring at all, and is being used quietly and discreetly, it renders a public place less public. It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered individual, the flaneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished.

...

Every place is exactly the same as every other place. They are all just nodes on a network--and so, increasingly, are we.

Local cache

Posted at 2004-01-26 01:51:51 by Richard • Link to Disconnected Urban…