An event or moment · 2007 · Reachability
The phone becomes a person
Roughly half a billion phone numbers become dialable, a fan can in principle hear a recorded voice, and the novelty ringtone sells the idea that a performer can be present in a pocket for about four years.
The real discontinuity, and a much narrower one than the standard story. The feeling was not new; the possibility of contact was. The reply is now structurally impossible in a way a letter never was - an email is not paper, it does not have to be opened, and the person reading it has a thousand. The conditions that made a reply work were small enough for one human to hold, and they are gone permanently.
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