Summary
[...] was there not a barbaric invasion of private space every time you pressed the Bakelite to your ear and a complete stranger forced his way directly into your cerebellum? Never before have quite so many spoken of quite so little to so many others. [...] what impinges on me as I listen to the clamorous hymning of a drunken night out, or the stentorian epitaph to a regional sales meeting, or the rendezvous raucously reconfigured for the umpteenth time, is: "Where the hell are these people as they speak?" So confused have the boundaries between conversations become that it's by no means uncommon to see people attempting to buy - or sell- something while holding a mobile phone conversation. [...] what were once immediate and personalised bonds are constantly being vitiated by remote and anonymous ones, as the individual rattles around in a shaken snow globe of randomised verbiage.
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Extract
Your Call Is Not Important to Us
I vividly remember my first experience of hands-free mobile phones. It must have been around 1998 in Stockholm. I arrived by night, in the teeth of a blizzard, and distinctly shaken up by having flown from London sitting between the pilots of the SAS flight. I was, shamefully, on a press junket,...
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