There's a phone booth on the corner…

"It's generally considered a good idea to know where you are at all times, apart from occasional lapses due to alcohol or passion," writes Michael Parsons in a comment article about global positionsing systems. "Technology is now making it increasingly easy for everyone else to know where you are as well."

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erIt's generally considered a good idea to know where you are at all times, apart from occasional lapses due to alcohol or passion. Technology is now making it increasingly easy for everyone else to know where you are as well. Global Positioning Systems are starting to migrate from dedicated units designed for cars into other devices, like this mobile phone from Benefon, called the Twig. What does it say about us that we crave constant electronic connection?

We've seen other GPS-equipped telephones, but what distinguishes the Twig is that it looks like an ordinary mobile phone rather than a small handheld computer. This seems fitting to me, because the mobile phone is the device that has made us a permanent node on the network. GPS technology takes our connection to the grid one step further, but the genie was out the bottle once we all started carrying around mobile phones.We are so used to having mobile phones around us that we no longer see how much emotional reassurance they provide. We have slowly shifted from feeling slightly unnatural when connected ("Hello? Who's on the line? Hello?" ) to feeling very unnatural when disconnected ("And then I lost my mobile. Nightmare"). This week I sat next to a woman on a train whose bag kept vibrating with an irritating, mosquito-like hum. I wondered if she had hearing problems, and hadn't noticed that her phone was going off, or was missing a vibrating alert because the phone was in an outside pocket of her bag, nicely positioned to irradiate my head. I asked if she knew if her phone was ringing. "Oh no," she said complacently. "That's my Blackberry collecting my e-mails."
It may be that she didn't know she could set her device not to give her a vibromassage at three-second intervals, but I suspect she just liked the reassurance provided by this humming network node in her Mulberry. It was impossible to miss the warm glow she got from being connected. We don't all have Blackberrys but we pretty much all have phones, and we are all getting the same nice warm glow of connection and validation from these devices.

Personal productivity guru David Allen, godfather of Getting Things Done, an approach to managing your day which has become something of a cult amongst programmers and tech industry workers, sees the Blackberry as symptomatic not of our efficiency but of our failure to make decisions and prioritise. We can't make decisions about what's important, so we carry our office around with us at all times, compensating for our failing powers of decision. (He even speculates that after a while people will start carrying even larger handhelds, called Watermelons, to provide even more information, reassurance, and security…)

Many people in the rich parts of the world live atomised urban lives characterised by anonymity, hurry, and rush, and a kind of low-level anxiety caused by the stresses of the world we've built ourselves. We seem to be turning to digital devices to provide compensatory connections that remind us who we are and that give us good feelings of connection and identity.

Mobile phone companies know this and market their products to young pre-teens. I've seen research which explains that the period of adolescent uncertainty, in which you're not really sure who your friends are, is the time when a mobile phone for texting and calling friends is at its most powerful. The modern mobile phone user in the UK will spend most of their money on calls before the age of forty. After that, presumably, they have a landline and a fixed circle of friends, and don't need constant texts and calls to reassure them that they're accepted by their peer group.

I actually don't think any of this is inherent in the technology. You can do exactly the same thing with a landline. If you remember Woody Allen's brilliant film, Play it again Sam, the hero's friend Dick, an overworked businessman, neurotically provides phone numbers to his colleagues wherever he goes so that he can be in touch with the office at all times.

Dick: I'll be at 362-9296 for a while; then I'll be at 648-0024 for about fifteen minutes; then I'll be at 752-0420; and then I'll be home, at 621-4598. Yeah, right George, bye-bye.

Linda: There's a phone booth on the corner. You want me to run downstairs and get the number? You'll be passing it.

Dick is a self-important corporate jackass who misses what is going on around him because he's always in pursuit of an important business deal. When did we all turn into him?

Michael Parsons is Editor of CNET.co.uk, the personal technology and consumer electronics website. He was Editorial Director of the Industry Standard Europe and European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk