Where are you?

Every day we ask someone where they are. It's a common enough question when we use our mobile phones to talk to our child or to confirm that the friend we were meeting is late. But we hardly stop to think that this question was, until not long ago, quite stupid. Forty years ago and apart from some special context, like a philosophy seminar or a psychiatric hospital, no one asked another person where they were. When we chatted with someone, it was because we had them in front of us or on the other end of the phone line, whose location was well known. All this has lost its meaning with mobile phones.

This is a good example of how a technological artifact not only allows us to do things we couldn't do before, but is also a tool that changes our way of thinking and understanding ourselves, and we are not always fully aware of this.

The mobile phone is a device that facilitates communication with others, spoken or written, but it does so by disregarding location. Today we no longer have to meet someone at a specific place, the usual bar or the bus station lobby, to be able to talk. Nor do we have to wait for someone to arrive at a place where there is a landline phone, but what is relevant now is availability. It's not about finding a place to talk, but the moment. This leads us to start many conversations with a question that would have sounded absurd before: can you talk?

All this implies a change in the way we communicate, but also in how our relationship with others is configured. Today we all take for granted that others carry a mobile phone in their pocket and, therefore, that there is potential availability, which even modifies the rules of courtesy. Before, not answering the landline phone could only indicate the person's absence from a place. Today, however, this reason is discarded and others appear with a much more intentional charge: they are busy, they don't want to talk now, they don't want to talk to me, it's not the right time, etc. Needless to say, this causes an anxious situation for the interlocutor, who always expects a certain immediacy in receiving the other's response.

Never before had people been so connected to each other, but this paradoxically generates a situation of constant anguish. The expectation of always having to be available makes forgetting one's mobile phone a traumatic event. Not knowing where someone is generates the need to know where they are when we suspect they are not where we thought, like a child we were picking up at the school exit. But, in general, this anguish comes because corporeality and its location in a place are part of our way of being, and having to do without this in a digital world causes us anguish. People are not simple interconnected emitters of information, like a computer network, but beings of flesh and blood, bodies that also take shape according to the place where they are or the people around them. That's why when we talk to someone, we instinctively need to know where they are or who is nearby.

As we said at the beginning, technology not only changes the way we do things, but the way we think and feel. Thanks to the mobile phone that most people carry, it has never been so easy to talk to someone, nor so common to not know where the person we are talking to is. We can be permanently connected with other people and, even so, feel completely alone and lost.