When I took out a smartphone at a baseball game in 2002, I was the only one in the whole stadium. I looked weird as hell to my friends, chatting to someone in the UK over GPRS. Now everyone has a smartphone. Any stadium can instantly turn into a festival of flashes. We forget how weird this is. It’s weird.
2002 is 20 years ago, which is roughly a generation. Even my generation, which technically remembers this time, doesn’t really remember. We have offloaded so much of our imagination to these devices that we literally can’t imagine a world without them. But there was. Today someone living that lifestyle would look insane, but that’s really a case of the world going mad more than anything else.