FROM THE PREFACE

Alex’s silver cell phone lay on a shelf next to a jar of scissors and combs. When the phone emitted a soothing piano arpeggio, she stopped cutting my hair to check the caller ID. After confirming that it wasn’t someone calling from her six-year-old daughter’s school, she picked up her shears again. I asked Alex how people managed before we were accessible virtually anytime and any place, and we both laughed. Then she asked how this book was inspired.

Displacing Place grew out of conversations with my mother about technological innovations during her lifetime. Her mother’s mobility had been severely limited during the last few years of her life due to illness. My mother remarked that my grandmother would have benefited tremendously from technologies that we take for granted today, such as cordless phones, voicemail, and television remote controls. I remembered that when we telephoned my grandmother, we would wait about fifteen rings for her to answer, because it took her that long to get up and walk to the one phone in her apartment, which was mounted on a wall in the dining room. It must have been profoundly frustrating for my grandmother when she walked as quickly as she could to answer the phone and the caller hung up before she reached it. Without an answering machine, voicemail, or caller ID—they hadn’t been invented yet—she had no way of knowing whose call she had missed.

In contrast to my grandparents’ era, mobile communication and nearly seamless anytime, any place connectivity characterize the twenty-first century. Worldwide, more and more people are using portable devices for communication, information seeking, and entertainment. In unanticipated and far-reaching ways, these technologies are impacting how and where people work, play, and relate to one another. The essays in this collection explore the nuances of these transformations.

Sharon Kleinman
New Haven, Connecticut