[Image Left: Anthony Townsend] “[I]t should be clear that telepathy is historically linked to numerous other tele-phenomena: it is part of the establishment of tele-culture in general. It is necessarily related to other nineteenth-century forms of communication from a distance through new and often invisible channels, including the railway, telegraphy, photography, the telephone and the gramophone. It is this part of a culture which is still in the process of being articulated, and in this respect perhaps the question “Do you believe in telepathy?” need not be regarded as categorically or essentially distinguishable from questions such as “Do you believe in the telephone?” or “Do you believe in television?”

[...] To begin the present discussion, I re-purpose the term “telepathic communication” as a rhetorical tool. By telepathic communication I mean the current and future set of personal mobile communications devices, services and infrastructure – from simple mobile phones to immersive, shared augmented reality.7 As one of the leading legitimate scientific investigators of psychic phenomena described it:

We venture to introduce the words Telesthesia and Telepathy to cover all cases of impression received at a distance without the normal operation of the recognised sense organs. These general terms may, we think, be found of permanent service.

“Of permanent service”, indeed. The adoption of this term is intended to focus our attention on the cognitive and sensory nature of mobile communications over the purely functional, social aspects. That is, by employing this term, I seek to emphasize the nature of mobile communications as an extension of the self, rather than exclusively a media for social communication…” — Thinking in Telepathic Cities [PDF] by Anthony Townsend.