Earlier today I participated in a public meeting of the National Council on the Arts. It was a teleconference chaired from Washington, D.C., by Dana Gioia, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The other participants were scattered across the country. I took part in the first half of the meeting via cell phone from the Jackson Hole
on Eighty-Fifth Street and Columbus Avenue, where I was wolfing down the fast-cooling remnants of a medium-rare hamburger that had arrived at my table ten minutes later than I expected. For the second half, I removed my cell phone and myself to a bench in Central Park, basking in the sunshine as the council went about its collective business.
I’m too old to take cell phones for granted. I still remember the first time I received a call from a car phone, back in the days when such things were far from commonplace. Not long after I moved to New York some two decades ago, I made a special point of calling my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., from a pay phone on a subway platform, and she was impressed. Now I can’t remember the last time I used a pay phone. (In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw a phone booth.)
Technology is part wonderful and part terrible, which means it’s really neither. It makes it possible for me to sit in Central Park on a sunny May day and talk to anyone in the world who has a phone. Whether or not that’s a good thing is, of course, another matter.