https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/youre-not-listening-kate-murphy-review

Restaurants are noisy, social media connections are shallow, giving a TED talk is living the dream. What happened to conversation?

In 2005 I sat opposite someone at a dinner party who spent much of the evening looking at her phone under the table, sending messages and smiling to herself. I was amazed by her rudeness. A month or so later, I sat near the Indian politician Rahul Gandhi in a restaurant. He was with a glamorous woman but they weren’t speaking; instead they spent the whole evening looking at their phones. I found their behaviour fascinating and peculiar. Fifteen years later, the preference for phones over humans no longer seems in the least remarkable.

This is among the subjects Kate Murphy analyses in You’re Not Listening. She sets out the problem in painstaking, depressing detail. “At cafes, restaurants and family dinner tables, rather than talking to one another, people look at their phones. Or if they are talking to one another, the phone is on the table as ifa part of the place setting, taken up at intervals as casually as a knife or fork, implicitly signalling that the present company is not sufficiently engaging.” There was a time when, during idle or anxious moments, people reached for a cigarette, she writes. Now “people just as reflexively reach for their phones. Like smokers and cigarettes, people get jittery without their phones.”