Cell phones and Philip Roth

My friend Charles has invited me to contribute to this blog, and I'm going to try my best.
So, here's my first post:

While reading 'Exit Ghost' by Philip Roth, I came across this paragraph on cell phones, which I'd like to share here. To put in context - the main character, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, has just returned to New York in 2004 after spending ten years away from the city, living rurally and mostly reclusively:-

What suprised me most my first few days walking in the city? The most obvious thing - the cell phones. We had no reception as yet up on my mountain, and down in Athena, were they do have it, I'd rarely see people striding the streets talking uninhibitedly into their phones. I remembered a New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves were crazy. What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say - so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers where on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect. What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient - impatient and angry like a stupid little god.