Are you honestly saying that this (neat) art piece, which is of carefully curated shots taken over months, is general proof that phones are some fundamentally different mode of isolation, compared to any other tool that humans have had?

I would say that. Most other tools have a "pull" dynamic where the user has made the decision to use them. Instead, while phones also have this dynamic, they also have a "push" dynamic where someone else, or even just an automated notification, can demand your attention.

The second noteworthy distinction is phones' ability to solve many different problems as well as provide many different willful distractions in a very accessible manner. A tool that can be both productive and entertaining requires a higher amount of willpower to use productively without succumbing to the desire to use it for entertainment.

Some of the most productive coding I've done has been in places where there was no internet to temp me with distractions.

I would actually be interested to hear you explain why, in terms of social isolation, phones are not a fundamentally different mode of isolation than any other human tool.

Social media are designed to be as addictive as possible. Smartphones have replaced a great number of tools and devices. At the end of the day it's up to the individuals to not spend a lot of time on their phones, but, I can see it's hard for most people. At least around me (including myself). Another thing I've noted is the exhaustion experienced after spending a long time on your smartphone.

I sometimes wonder if it is the ubiquity of the phone that allows us to use it as a framework (or that it reveals in some egregious way we cannot ignore) a fundamental social state of modernism that has, in one form or another, been there since its inception. And that we an ignore this because, prior to the contemporary age, there remains so little detailed record if the lives of the, for lack of a better term, masses. Now everyone can comment on youtube videos no matter where they're at in the world or what else they may be doing at the moment. So that we are overwhelmed with our own banality, subsumed beneath a flood of images and messages that we are beginning to feel in some instinctual sense, can never approach in even the most rudimentary of ways, that which we have called communication.

That's not how burden of proof works :) I'm not the one making the claim that phones isolate us differently.

This is nothing new. Couples have been physically together yet miles apart way before phones came around, and still are.

Oh yes let's all remember 2005 when no one ever looked in the mirror and everyone in big city public transport held hands and sung folk songs on their morning commute.

For the record I have sung songs with a subway car full of people on Chicago's Red Line. Was not during commuting hours tho. Alcohol was probably a bigger factor than the presence of cell phones.

The N train was the "3am Disney Sing-a-Long" after the bar on my friend's ride home to Queens.