A new book argues that, in a networked world, “moving hundreds of bodies around in large vessels will go out of fashion.” Illustration by Joon Mo Kang

I fly an average of twice a month these days, usually for work, and although I spent much of my life afraid of airplanes, I now chase them with an addict’s need. If it has been a while since I have been aloft, I’m restless, peevish, mindless, tired—useless as a human being. The start of a flight heralds a game afoot. The rush is skittish and improbable. A freighted mass of metal rattling down the runway gains a sudden burst of speed and, in a small, miraculous gasp, loses its weight, rises, and soars, enacting careful turns and radio coördinations that accrue toward effortlessness. On the ground, on landing, it’s again a metal hulk; the metamorphosis reverses itself. A part of me is sure I’ll die at every takeoff, yet I need to feel that panic and lift or I’m hopeless. Flight is the best metaphor for writing that I know.

The sublimity of the act is heightened by the earthly mess around it. On arriving at the airport, you push your way through snarled security lines—the shoes, the belt, the laptop, the canopic bag of fluids—and purchase a day-old ciabatta sandwich. You sit and read, glancing at a suspended screen that seems to play only disaster news and weather reports from the Midwest. You hear your boarding announcement: more queues and lost elderly people with enormous bags. The airplane seems to hail from the same era as your old dishwasher, which conked out last year. The guy beside you has a wide stance and an overmedicated gaze that suggests he will drool during his sleep. It has been three hours since you left home, and you are still waiting.

Why do we board planes? Flying relies on an old, delay-mired technology, scarcely updated since the advent of the jumbo jet, and the sorts of people who can pay for tickets usually have better options for getting what they need. Once, if you had to make a presentation to your Tokyo office, you would fly there. These days, you can tap a few buttons on your phone or your computer and start beaming your PowerPoint deck onto a remote screen. If you’d like a bespoke lopapeysa, you don’t need to go to Iceland; you can order it online. The global promises of air travel—the wrinkles in time that allow the jet-setter to have breakfast in Boston and a lunch meeting in L.A., or to spend Friday seeing what’s new in Phnom Penh and still be at work on Monday—are today realized with much less trauma using screens. Sure, you still buy tickets back to Minnesota for your parents’ Christmas dinner, or to Tulum for a beach week. As a standard of global connection and fast access, though, air travel is now largely obsolete.

The forecast for the industry, accordingly, is bleak. “What is changing is that there is no promise of change, only a sort of numb acceptance of the beleaguered experience of flight,” Christopher Schaberg writes in “The End of Airports” (Bloomsbury), a wandering but well-fuelled study of air travel’s fading profile in our digitally transported age. “This acceptance is often signaled and mediated by where we look in airports: down into our palms, where faster and quieter machines connect us to one another.” Schaberg teaches literature, at Loyola University, in New Orleans, but he used to work at the airport in Bozeman, Montana, and his interest in the culture of flight arises from years spent on the tarmac and at the check-in desk.

Schaberg’s first book, “The Textual Life of Airports” (2011), explained how the airport mythologized and subverted air travel for passengers. That work emerged from his dissertation, and it followed a style of feverish pop-cultural close reading strangely valued in some academic quarters. It sometimes seemed a touch insane. (Puzzling over a Leo Cullum cartoon from this magazine—a guy dragging himself through the desert on all fours hears a boarding call and frets, “I’ll never make it”—Schaberg complained that the drawing “goes against the environmental writer Gary Snyder’s assertion that crawling can help people get to know their bioregions.”) “The End of Airports” is, pleasantly, less ramrod and more personal. Schaberg recalls the moment when air travel marked the apogee of cosmopolitan romance; he believes that the future favors virtual experience. He tells us, “In a world where social networking can facilitate revolutions, and where connections happen as easily online as off, it seems inevitable that moving hundreds of bodies around in large vessels will go out of fashion.”

Surprisingly, the numbers do not bear this out. In 1960, a hundred million people flew. In 2006, two billion did. Today, after the advent of the mobile Web and the intensification of terror-inspired travel constraints, 3.5 billion people fly every year. Schaberg’s inquiry is vexed, partly because he can’t decide whether the problem with flight is that it’s unfashionable or that it’s technologically obsolete. But the real contest lies elsewhere. The battle between jet planes and smartphones isn’t about speed or glamour. It’s about ways of knowing.

Several weeks ago, I found myself at a lunch seminar of neuroscientists in Central Jutland, halfway up the Danish coast. The day’s lecture was short, with slides; the speaker, a neuropsychologist named Chris Frith, argued that a crucial feature of consciousness was regret. I had flown to Denmark a few days earlier, for other escapades. The reason I had been invited to the seminar was that I’d met a postdoc researcher one night at an underground circus held at an artists’ commune. The reason I was at the circus was that a magician with a black coat and a pencil mustache had urged me to go; I’d been introduced to him two hours earlier, by a Danish artist who had once been an acolyte of Allen Ginsberg, in New York. I had been pointed toward the artist after asking about a lobby mural while checking out of my hotel that morning. Whatever I felt for those days’ adventures, it was not regret.

Flight, from the start, was thought to prime encounters of this kind. “Most of our existing methods of transport, together with the physical and mental emotions that accompany them, will be profoundly changed,” Rudyard Kipling told the Royal Geographical Society, in 1914. “The time is near when men will receive their normal impressions of a new country suddenly and in plan, not slowly and in perspective; when the most extreme distances will be brought within the compass of one week’s—one hundred and sixty-eight hours’—travel; when the word ‘inaccessible’ as applied to any given spot on the surface of the globe will cease to have any meaning.” Kipling’s tone was magisterial, but, as someone who had made a career out of describing journeys to far-seeming regions, he was marking the terms of his own artistic eclipse.

That was in February. By August, 1914, the First World War was under way, and Kipling’s vision was thrust into battle. Airplanes, a novelty technology that had first been series-manufactured a few years earlier, were dispatched for reconnaissance. In the spring of 1915, the French aircraft company Morane-Saulnier found that if you mounted a machine gun up front and put bullet deflectors behind the propeller blades you could shoot from the cockpit without damaging your own plane. By the Armistice, in 1918, France, Britain, Germany, and the United States had together produced nearly two hundred thousand aircraft and trained enough pilots to fly them. Commercial aviation was the afterglow of a campaign for terror in the skies.