With thanks to Rob Jacobs for pointing this video out in a post, Nokia has a fascinating little video/commercial out called “The Fourth Screen.”

The video show the previous three “screens,” – movies, T.V., and computers – and shows how they revolutionized things but often put us into our own little individual worlds. Nokia’s latest T.V./video screen, apparently built into a phone, is, naturally, a product they’re billing as one that will build community and allow us to be with people and share things with each other anytime and all the time.

Personally, I’m skeptical. MP3 players, cell phones and the like have not brought us together but allowed us to escape whatever the current reality is. How often have you seen someone walking down the street listening to his iPod yet oblivious to whatever was going on around him? How often have you been in a store and heard someone yelling into their cell phone, busily engaged with someone somewhere else, yet totally unaware of how much he was annoying those around him with his obnoxious behavior?

This is not to say that those tools don’t have their purpose, nor that a video phone can’t be useful, but if you want to market it as something that will build up a sense of community, well, I think you’re fooling yourself.