Question Technology: Jonathan Franzen doesn't want to hear your cellphone conversation

Novelist Jonathan Franzen has a good essay in the current issue of Technology Review. It's a complaint about cellphones, though it meanders into personal memoir about 9/11 and his parents (kind of an odd article to see in Technology Review). It begins:

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I'm still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already Grampaw--this is just the way life is now.

I'm not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late 20th century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs. And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise ("pink noise") that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor's television set: I love them. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinema-goers, so many open-mouthed crunchers of popcorn: yes.

Link: "I Just Called to Say I Love You": Cellphones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space (free registration required)

Also in this issue, and also a little unusual, is a book review by Emily Gould of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and a new collection of Walter Benjamin writings, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. The gist of her article is: Shirky is a cheerleader, Walter Benjamin was a pessimist (and complicated). Link: "It's Not a Revolution if Nobody Loses": A new age of "technological reproducibility" is here. Ugh.