Let's hazard an assertion: On or about June 2007, human character changed. To be more exact'because the phrase human character now feels antique'we might say instead that the human sensorium changed. By this we don't necessarily mean a sudden and definite alteration in how we perceive the world'in the forms, sources, and amount of information we absorb, and in how we conduct our relations with parents, children, spouses, partners, mentors, friends. Yet a transition was set in motion, differentiating life before the omnipresent smartphone and life after, and dating its onset to the birth of the iPhone seems apt. The above is a loose homage to words that Virginia Woolf wrote slightly more than a century ago about the collapse of Victorian gender and class norms, a shift that she placed more arbitrarily, with half-ironic playfulness, in December 1910, a decade and a half before her essay appeared. In both cases, the mutation seems at once massive and slippery, glaring and subtle; the...
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