Eric Jacobsen: How Car Culture is Making Us Lonelier

<p>“Choosing screens over people.” It’s a phrase we hear often these days in relation to smartphones and other digital devices. But, as Eric O. Jacobsen describes in his new book, <a href='http://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/three-pieces-of-glass/392901'>Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens</a>, we started choosing screens—or, more precisely, windshields—decades before the smartphone.</p> <p>Prior to the rise of car culture, we could expect to regularly interact with friends, neighbors, and strangers as we made our way through cities developed with walkability and multimodal transportation in mind. Especially since World War II, we still encounter those folks...but many of those encounters are “mediated by the automobile windshield.” Not only did car culture change how we build cities, it changed how (and how often) we encounter other people: “When we encounter someone [as a driver],” writes Jacobsen, “we don’t encounter another human being with whom we might connect. We as a driver meeting another driver encounter a competitor—a competitor for lane space and parking spaces.”</p> <p>Eric Jacobsen <a href='https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/9/18/podcast-episode-190-eric-jacobson'>returns</a> to The Strong Towns Podcast to talk about his new book, car culture, and the impact screens are having on our cities and communities. Jacobsen is senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Washington. He’s also the co-host (with <a href='https://www.strongtowns.org/journal?author=5475093ce4b0db66fb38d5b7'>our friend Sara Joy Proppe</a>) of <a href='https://www.embeddedchurch.com/'>The Embedded Church</a>, a podcast about churches in walkable neighborhoods. A member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Jacobsen is also the author of the books <a href='https://bookshop.org/books/the-space-between-a-christian-engagement-with-the-built-environment/9780801039089'>The Space Between Us</a> and <a href='https://bookshop.org/books/sidewalks-in-the-kingdom-new-urbanism-and-