Paul Goldberger's little piece in the hard-to-read medium-is-message over-sized magazine Metropolis titled Disconnected Urbanism was noticed by the trend-spotters at Arts & Letters Daily so I'd better weigh in, too. Goldberger discusses the urban experience in a way which calls forth no plausible reaction except "that's an interesting perspective."
PG is complaining about how cell phones destroy a sense of place because the person standing next to you waiting for the light to change --- assuming one is in a city where pedestrians actually observe the lights, which is no longer the case in Seattle, for instance --- is talking on a cell phone to someone in Madagascar or even two blocks away, which is probably the case --- well that is supposed to destroy our sense of place.
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. Technology has been doing this for a long time, of course--remember when people communicated with Europe by letter and it took a couple of weeks to get a reply? Now we're upset if we have to send a fax because it takes so much longer than e-mail. But the cell phone has changed our sense of place more than faxes and computers and e-mail because of its ability to intrude into every moment in every possible place. 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. You are in some other place--someplace at the other end of your phone conversation.
That's not my experience. I rather like the thrill of sitting in a cafe in, say, Whistler, BC, and hearing some woman rattling away in Spanish on her cell phone and wondering if she is talking to the head groom at her stables on the pampas, or perhaps to her boyfriend in Seattle. Human settlements have always been and continue to be about mixing. New York for example would not be half the city that it is if they were not foreign voices in the air. It doesn't bother me in the least or destroy the sense of place which I create to sense that people around me have myriad and mysterious connections and that they manifest those connections -- and only maybe, because for all we know that guy on the phone could simply be calling home 2 blocks away to see if his mates want extra cheese on the pizza --- through a cell phone.
As for me, I say that all these distance-compressing technologies are just pentimento, another layer, another fold in the noosphere, an enrichment of life. The idea that Seattle --- or Paris --- is less itself because some person standing next to me is talking to someone ten thousand miles away strikes me as a journalist looking for an article to write.
UPDATE:Gizmodo also sees it somewhat the same way as I do:
Goldberger also unfairly discounts how this virtual space he refers to can be meaningful and powerful in its own right. Believe it or not, sometimes walking down the street while talking to another person can actually augment, rather than diminish, your own experience of a place.
Thanks for expressing this, David. I remember being a little annoyed by the column. I do have to admit that observing some over-coiffed yuppie babbling away in the middle of the grocery store is annoying, but to claim that it is somehow destructive of our cities?
Posted by: Brian Miller | Nov 18, 2003 at 12:51 PM
The optimistic reaction is, Hey, people *everywhere* want to talk to someone *here*!
Posted by: clew | Nov 20, 2003 at 10:44 PM