Sitting in an airport waiting for a plane is different now that there are cellphones.
Before, you saw a random collection of people, all stranded together in limbo. Now, as they talk into their cellphones and smile private smiles, you can see that each one is linked to a strong, specific web of others who know and love them. You can almost see the attachments, stretchy and tensile as bungee cords. The cellphone somehow makes you aware that each face in the airport, blank and meaningless to you, is familiar and beloved to someone; that, hard as it is to imagine, the very features of that face and the sound of that voice make someone somewhere's heart leap with recognition. It's as if people wear their social networks around them like an aura, an arterial diagram of the tributaries feeding the heart. It's reassuring to see; it reveals pattern where there seemed to be chaos.
An early, politically-incorrect joke about cellphones was that it used to be only schizophrenics who walked down the street talking out loud; now you can't tell who's crazy any more. But the resemblance reveals something we never understood about schizophrenics: they're talking to their significant others, too.
- amba
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