By Joe Wilson

This week in Chapel Hill a new year began. Thousands of students converged upon UNC’s campus (a select few upon New East, home of Carolina Planning) to begin the annual academic cycle, just as they have in innumerable seasons past. For Angles, though, this year is a special one. It is the blog’s tenth anniversary, an occasion which we believe merits celebration and contemplation.

Throughout the year, we will be publishing a series called “Angles of Reflection,” in which writers will engage in conversation with posts from the blog’s archive and explore how the field has changed  — and how it has not — over the years. To kick things off, we’re going back to one of its earliest posts, Planning for the Phone Age. 

Originally written in 2013 for Changing Media’s The Good Plan, this piece, by DCRP alum Lindsay Davis, took a look at the increasing distractions that smartphones were proving to be. Even at that time, Davis noted how they took people out of their physical surroundings, often to the detriment of interpersonal connection. “This,” she wrote, “leaves a new task up to cities — integrating the self and the cellphone into the public realm.”

A decade later, Davis’s words feel prescient. The self and the cellphone are by now intimately integrated, and devices guide our movement through the public realm almost like another sense. Beyond their use as tools — restaurant menus, bus passes — their influence extends into the very way we perceive ourselves and our places. GPS maps distort our sense of space and direction even as they increase our ability to get from one point to another. Group messages, digital classrooms and online forums take on many of the characteristics of social spaces. At a deep level, we relate ourselves to our screens, to our digital representations as dots on a map and text on a page. And, at times, this new sense of identity comes at the expense of our surroundings; our locations and our social interactions become more rooted in  information than experience.

Photo credit: Robin Worrall, Unsplash

Often, and understandably, the focus has been on the disorienting effects of these changes. GPS navigation and social media physically alter our brains. In recent years, with the rise of AI-generated text and images, the links between digital and physical reality have become tenuous. It’s enough to rattle the nerves of even the staunchest techie.

But there is also opportunity in this shake-up. Navigational tools can be designed to build, rather than replace, personal wayfinding abilities. Soundwalks like that of Chapel Hill’s Marian Cheek Jackson Center connect listeners not only to their immediate surroundings but also to the people and histories behind them. Social media, for all its faults, has created havens of community for historically oppressed groups.

Fundamentally, the challenge remains the same today as it did in 2013. How can we — individuals, communities, organizations, cities — use devices to connect to our environments, instead of bypassing them? How can we use them to expand our consciousness, rather than restricting it?

The solutions, undoubtedly, will require deep reflection.

Joe Wilson is a second year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill, and the managing editor of Angles. 

Edited by Samantha Pace

Feature photograph by Joe Wilson