Brave New Wireless World

In November 2003, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger penned a diatribe in Metropolis magazine against the isolation and dissolution of place wrought by the pervasive use of cellphones on city streets. "The mobile phone renders a public place less public," he wrote. "It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered individual… And suddenly the meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished."

Goldberger’s critique of mobile communications technology capped more than a decade of analysis revolving around the ability of global communications networks — for better and for worse — to release people from the constraints of time and place. "The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography," wrote Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital. "Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place at a specific time."

In Pandemonium, Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice University, proclaimed: "The bandwidth has replaced the boulevard."

Actually, it didn’t.

by Linda Baker

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