Motherhood, Screened Off by Susan Dominus
The problem with smartphones isn't their ubiquity. It's their opacity.
My mother's address book is one of the small visual details of my childhood that I can perfectly conjure, although I am sure no photograph of it exists. Fake-leather-bound, filled with her formal, spidery script, it was, to me, barely legible, with addresses crossed out and replaced with new ones as friends' lives shifted. I often was dispatched to grab it for her from a kitchen drawer. I knew when she was looking for someone's phone number, which seems unremarkable, except that my own children do not know when I am searching for a phone number, because all they see is me, on my iPhone, intently focused on something mysterious and decidedly not them.
It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life.