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photo, so it comes up automatically when I call her or she calls me.
    I really like this image of her, and I contemplate it for amoment before putting the phone to my ear. She’s wearing a pink-and-white-striped sweater and looking up at the lens with a certain cat-that-swallowed-the-canary expression she always gets just before bursting into a laugh. She laughs a lot, so this is a characteristic look for her. In other words, the photo captures something essential about my mother.
    When she answers, I tell her I’m on my way but running a little behind. She chuckles knowingly. We’ve had this conversation so many times, it’s Kabuki now and we both know our parts. She says she’ll hold dinner and why don’t I call again when I’m twenty minutes away? I agree to do this and tell her I can’t wait to see her. We sign off.
    I take the phone from my ear, glance again at the photo, then hit “END” and watch it disappear. Driving along, I feel an unexpected surge of emotion. I’m thinking about how fun it always is to spend time with my mother, how lucky I was to be born to such a warm, companionable person. Lately I’ve noticed shades of her humor in my son, and I wonder now if he somehow inherited that from her. Have they isolated a gene for good-naturedness?
    As the minutes pass and I drive along, these thoughts about my mother flow into new ones. In my consciousness, the smile from the photo merges with the pine woods on either side of the highway and the jazz playing on the radio, beamed down from a satellite miles above the earth. Memories rise up out of nowhere and flit around me in the car. They’re not specific memories of particular events but rather scenes in which I see my mother doing normal, habitual things. In the video archive of the mind, these would be the generic clips I’ve filed under “Mom.” There she is walking across a lawn. Sitting under a beach umbrella with a book. Talking to someone at a party. Holding her sides as she breaks up over a funny story. For a while, the car is a floating cloud of filial affection and, well, joy.It’s extraordinary, this feeling of time out of time. Everything dreary and confusing about my quotidian life has dropped away. I’m not the rushed, cornered, inadequate creature I often feel like. I’m absorbed in these memories, which seem to come from a place both beyond me and deep inside me, as if far and near, outward and inward, have come together in a new harmony.
    My mother and I are no longer connected in the literal sense, as we were minutes earlier. Yet I’m feeling a connection to her that is stronger than the one we had when we were actually chatting. Even as I enjoy this, I find myself thinking about the tool that engendered it, the unprepossessing, low-end clamshell-style phone now sitting dormant in the cupholder. How did it do that?
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    T HIS EXPERIENCE IS a microscopic example of life in the early twenty-first century, just one digital connection out of the billions that now transpire every day. However, if we step back and examine it a little more closely, there are certain basic elements that figure in just about every connection and in everyone’s connected experience.
    First, notice that it all began with an utterly practical need. I was running late for an appointment, and I needed to notify the person who was expecting me. In this sense, it doesn’t matter that that person was my mother. I was using my mobile phone to perform a simple, utilitarian task. The call represents all the useful tasks our screens enable each day, not just in family and private life but in the working world and everywhere else.
    Not so many years ago, this particular useful task would have required a lot more time and effort. I would have had to stop the car and find a landline pay phone, probably at a gasstation or a highway rest stop, where it would have been necessary to pull over, park, and