May 24, 2003
Book Review
The Guardian publishes a positive review of Jon Agar's short book «Constant Touch: A Brief History of the Mobile Phone», available on Amazon.co.uk. It tells the historical story of the mobile phone, what happened and why and how the device that keeps us in constant touch has shifted how we live, work and play.
"Agar argues that the mobile phone "gives society back a cohesion", but social cohesion, if it ever existed, is not obviously a result of a technology that allows innumerable micro-networks to remain, like terrorist cells, for ever cut off from one another. I'm on the train, she's on the bus, he's in the cafe: if we don't know each other already, we are no more "networked" by our mobiles than we were by the hard-wired Bakelite monsters of old." -- The Guardian.
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