Mark Pesce and Robert Tercek Next Billion Seconds:

“The emergence of Homo Nexus – Connected Man – happened virtually overnight, like mushrooms springing up from a damp paddock. The ground had been well sown with the electric technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries: telegraph, landline telephone and radio all converged in 1980 within the first cellular telephone. Big, heavy and very expensive, the first mobiles became popular with the ultra-wealthy, who could afford both the mobiles themselves and the exorbitant usage fees they incurred. Wealth buys freedom, and the rich immediately understood the freedom afforded by the mobile, using the gadget to transact business and manage their own affairs, wherever they happened to be.

A similar transition happened with the introduction of landline telephony, during the last years of the 19th century. The wealthy brought landlines into their homes and businesses, using the telephone to extend their reach. The landline, however, connects to a place: an office, kitchen or bedroom. Ring a landline from a landline and you bring one place closer to another.

The mobile telephone dispensed with the importance of place. Where a landline connects to a place, a mobile connects directly to a person. There is no ‘where’ for the mobile. There is only ‘who’. When we ring someone on their mobile, and an unexpected voice answers, we experience a brief moment of displacement, as though we’d dialed Europe and gotten through to Mars instead. We suspect body-snatching: we’ve dialed a person, how could someone else answer? It’s as though the connection lost its way and connected to someone else.

What we lost in place we recovered in community, no longer suffering under the tyranny of distance. People who live far apart – or even just beyond a comfortable cooee – now enjoy as much intimacy as they care to allow. We live within each other’s pockets, available with a few pokes of a fingertip. We may not know where we are, but we know how we are related. Lost in space, but not alone, we are everywhere, even if we don’t quite know where.

It seems that place now matters less – and has always mattered less – than relation. We value our connection to others more than anything else, because that connection forms the foundation which brings us everything else.”