What is the meaning of the picaresque when it is our devices that are mobile, and we are increasingly sedentary? Are we the flâneur as phoneur?

Then again, even the most basic mobile phone camera can do something similar with the right light and shade. Indeed, Joel Sternfeld's latest book echoes the Polaroid books of old in so far as it comprises his mobile phone shots of the shopping malls and consumers of Dubai. It is called iDubai and announces the coming of the phoneur — the photographer as flaneur, forever walking and shooting and, if he has time, daydreaming.

The phoneur is the postmodern flâneur: a mobile phone user strolling the cityscape. The flâneur, implicated within modernist scopophilia…, is "the spectator of the modern world"…. Likewise, the phoneur is a commentator on the postmodern world, speaking from the mobile phone’s commercial capabilities.