Inquirer: What are cell phones doing to our society?

And sure enough, the morning after my iPhone was cooked, the following article appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

• What are cell phones doing to our society?

One of the points that the writer, Jonathan Last, makes in the article is something that my wife and I discuss all of the time. Cell phones let us connect individually, but disconnect socially. He talks about this as “radical disengagement” where using the cell phone in public excludes us from the activity around us while imposing our personal activities on them as well.

While it may seem strange, I actually reserve my bluetooth headset to my car. Otherwise, I use the wired headphones. I try to avoid the disengagement but I’m certainly not perfect with this. It is a hard balance because the default behavior is making the “radical disengagement” not quite so radical.

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