The Guardian has a great article about effect technology has had on our idea of personal space.

… inserted firmly in both his ears were the distinctive white buds of iPod headphones. He had been walking peacefully, wrapped in a portable, personal bubble of sound. Physically, he was out in the open air. Birds were singing. The sun shone and the wind sighed in the trees. But he might as well have have been in a soundproofed basement. He was the living, breathing embodiment of the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that technology is the art of arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it.

We take this kinda scene for grant these days and the writer probably would have too but he’d recently just seen The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon .

What grabbed me most were the urban scenes. They show a world that had not yet been dominated by the motor car nor homogenised by the bland standardisation of retail chains. What’s most striking, though, is not that the streets seem perpetually thronged with people - hardly surprising when you consider what living conditions were like for poorer people - but the extent to which they interact with one another when they’re out and about.

Men raise their hats to women; people stop to talk; groups congregate at junctions and street corners. The clear implication is that, for Edwardians, being out in public meant being on display and being sociable. It meant paying attention to what was going on around you, and acknowledging the existence of others.

It’s not clear when all of this changed, but my guess is that technology - in the shape of the Sony Walkman - had a lot to do with it. As the Walkman de nos jours , the iPod is simply continuing what Sony started. But not even Sony could have single-handedly destroyed the notion of social space. The coup de grce was administered by another piece of technology: the mobile phone.

We haven’t really begun to explore the social significance of mobile telephony, but already some things are becoming clear. The first is that the technology provides some people with an opportunity - perhaps even an imperative - to ignore the fact that they are in a public space. This is shown by the readiness with which they enter into phone conversations that in earlier days would be seen as requiring privacy

It’s true that technology has, while connecting us with some, disconnected us from our physical surroundings. But location aware technology is looking to reverse that trend and wants to reconnect us to our physical space. The only thing to be weary of is that that will still be a mediated interaction, a bubble with view. Bursting the bubble might mean simply turning all the gadgets off and going for a walk.