Zillow

On first playing with an iphone. Utterly exhilarating, the way that playing with my first Macintosh was around 1984 I think, or the first time I opened a web browser—Mosaic—in 1993. In each case, the first moments of fiddling about showed that important aspects of life were going to change radically and forever and for the better. The world had instantly a new size and scope (smaller and bigger); whole orders of chores had disappeared.
With the iphone, amazing as the device immediately is, it's not quite as sudden as that: it's possibilities become apparent more slowly. Take Zillow, one of its apps. It shows you on a map what real estate is for sale whereever you are as well as the value of every house on any road you're travelling through (or anywhere else come to that). It turns space into a series of dollar signs.
When you click on a dollar amount, an address and photos of a house appear: interiors and external views. So it's a medium for fantasies. It becomes easy, irresistable, to wonder, What if I were to buy this? What if I were to live here? A map dotted with dollar amounts, especially if not formidable ones, opens the door to a new life. Like novels might.