The Garden of Eden, with cellphones

There has been a lot of well deserved attention on the power of the cell phone to separate us from our surroundings, and our senses.  Though using cell phones may allow us to connect with something else other than our immediate physical bodily sensations and immediate environment (e.g. we can talk to people on the other side of the globe), this perhaps comes at a tradeoff--for when using our cell phones, our attention is directed to the cell phone, as opposed to our immediate environment and the people around us.  Think of the image of someone using a cell phone while sitting down at a coffee shop or airport oblivious to what is going on around them, instead their connection with reality is mediated by the technology of their cell phone instead their sensory awareness of what is in their immediate environment.  In this way, the cell phone causes a "separation."  

But this separation is not new.  Perhaps the first separation with our environment occurred when someone started using shoes, which in some ways is also a disconnection with the immediate reality of the ground.  Or, your connection with the earth is mediated through the shoes.  Sure, you might be able to do different things with shoes, walk in regions you could not walk with ordinary bare feet, but still your sense of the earth is affected by the technology of the shoe, and thus somewhat separated from a connection with the earth.

Same with clothes.  They also separate us from our immediate sensation of the environment.

In this way, if you are into the whole "Garden of Eden" archetype thing, the separation from the Garden of Eden came from putting on clothes.  That and shoes may have been the first separation humans had which caused us to be separate from their immediate physical sensations.  And it was not a god that kicked us out of the Garden of Eden, we literally walked out.