Where Are You?

The aim of this book is to shed light on the most philosophically interesting of contemporary objects: the mobile phone. The title, Where are you? An Ontology of the Cell Phone, is made up of the three key words of the text. First, 'Where are you?' is arguably the philosophical (and everyday) question of our age, the one we most often ask, due to the 'transformation of presence' brought by the most powerful technological tool of our times: the mobile phone. The second key word is, in fact, 'Mobile': cell phones are the absolute tool, the tool that, for Descartes and Hegel, was the hand. Their incredible power comes from their mobility (they are like a computer, but we can carry them with us at all times, because they are both handy and hand-sized) but, quite surprisingly, they are not primarily for speaking. Here is the main philosophical point of this book: mobile phones are writing machines (text messages, email, archives of all kinds). This leads us to the third key word of the text: 'ontology'. Ontology is the study of 'what there is', and what there is in our age is a huge network of documents, papers, cards of all kinds that provide the basis for our society. Social reality is not constructed by a 'collective intentionality', or rather, not only. It is made of 'inscribed acts'. As Derrida already prophesized, our world revolves around writing. This why, with their writing power, mobile phones are an extremely interesting object, also from a philosophical point of view.