Today’s Washington Post features an unusually fine article from Joel Garreau (registration required) concerning the ways in which cellphones have changed, and continue to transform, our lives as a species on this planet. Twenty-five years of cellphone technology have brought us to the point that Google CEO Eric Schmidt can say, “Eventually there will be more cellphone users than people who read and write. I think if you get that right, then everything else becomes obvious.”

The article is full of insightful quotations and balanced judgment. There are the expected laments for lost privacy, for intrusive conversations in public spaces, but they’re contextualized in a much larger and more thoughtful analysis than I usually see. I’m especially impressed with the way in which Garreau has understood the intimacy of human contact represented and enabled by cellphones.

No educator can afford to overlook or downplay the ways in which cellphones are changing civilization on personal and global scales. It’s hard to imagine a technology in which microcosm and macrocosm are so tightly linked. We should have better ways inside the academy to think about these changes with our students, and to create within the possibilities these technologies afford us.

Here’s the way the article ends:

[Robert] Wright muses about adults in this new world: “An organism only gets to new levels occasionally. I wonder, has it ever seemed to any other generation that this is just a different world than the one you knew in adolescence?”

This is not the hyperbole of a techno-utopian, though some may say that “new levels” is too optimistic. The extent and character of the change, however, should not be in doubt.