4 October

Walking in a large shopping mall in a school holiday is a brilliant people-watching experience. What I increasingly notice is how the mobile phone has allowed us to essentially live inside our social networks now, more than at any other time in history. The phone has allowed us to take our friends everywhere with us. People are glued to them everywhere they go. They use the phone camera to plug their friends into where they are, and more importantly to curate a social look and feel inside their social networks. The whole world becomes raw material to build out that social identity. We are literally living inside the phones, because those phones are our social network. This is also leading to a dramatic acceleration of imitation, of fashions and trends, and from that the huge growth in interest in luxury or ‘premium’ things, because status is the currency of social life. I watched thousands of people looking almost identical in how they dressed, in expensive gear, all shaped by their imitative social networks.