Disconnected Urbanism

In the article, "Disconnected Urbanism" by Paul Goldberger, he discusses how people are now becoming disconnected from the world around them now due to the fact of cellphones existing and always being accessible and usable no matter or who we are with. As his article states that people are becoming disconnected from the urban world around them and are being sucked into a virtual world of just communicating through a phone, I do agree with this point to an extent. I agree with this point mainly because people will go around talking on a phone all day if they could and not experience what life has to offer around them. When we are on a phone talking and walking around, we do lose the sense of what's going on around us, which leaves us blind to any potential threat or offer that is happening at that moment in time. As the article states that if you are traveling somewhere like Paris, you would want to experience everything that Paris has to offer you due to the amount of time that you are staying there, but if you were to travel to Paris and be on your cellphone all day, you would not be able to truly live and enjoy the Paris experience. Being on a cellphone all day takes away the experience of living in the sense that we are just walking as if we are zombies who are unaware of what is going on in life around us. The article does make very good points to how our lives are changing due to cellphones, but I do not fully agree with what the author has to say.

I believe that cellphones have helped us in many ways, even though they have changed our lives drastically. In the article, I believe that Goldberger is cursing cellphones and making them seem as if they are useless and not helpful at all, which I believe is not true. Cellphones have allowed us to be able to communicate with someone at any point in time, which can be beneficial in many ways. If there was an emergency going on and you needed to tell someone at that point in time, but you were outside, a cellphone can and would help you since it would always be on you. Another way that cellphones have helped us is that they have allowed for communication with people at any given time with no restrictions put on us. The article does state that we are becoming disconnected from the urban life around us, but it does fail to state that the cellphone has revolutionized life as we know it today. The cellphone can be both beneficial and harmful in many ways as I and the article have stated, however, this is true with anything that is placed in our life.