Remember these things. They’re called payphones. In the olden days, people would put coins in them and use them to make telephone calls. Now, they are display cases for graffiti and old coffee cups.
You sometimes hear people complain about iPhones and other handheld devices – how people are increasingly distracted, oblivious to the world around them, living in an alternate reality.
Doing street photography, one of the easiest shots to get is someone walking around with ear buds or texting or talking on a cellphone.
But I wonder if the complaining is overblown. Haven’t we always lived in an alternate reality? We review conversations we’ve had. We think about things we need to do, or we remember things we’ve done before.
In a way, nothing has changed. Portable electronic devices have merely made explicit what has always been the case. In our minds, we have always lived elsewhere. Now, we whip out our iPhones as a public admission of that fact.
