[OldDave]

Very good topic. I can tell you already that all our children think we are dinosaurs, though.

When cell phones first became common there were a great tool and convenience. Somewhere along the line, that changed for some people, luckily not everyone. The people you complain about are the ones that are essentially a part of an on going conversation with the world that seems to have to take precedence over whatever is happening in front of them. I truly do not understand this, and I worked in the communications industry most of my life.

I agree that the conversations these folks have seem universally unimportant and mundane. They don't ever seem, to me, to raise to the level of being more important than the people who have chosen to be in your actual presence at the moment.

My 27 year old son is certainly one of those, although for people his age it usually isn't talking it's texting. In fact, he informed me calling someone on their phone is now considered rude. You might be interrupting them. You should text only. Great except for our generation with Consumer Cellular phones that don't text.

Actually this really brings up a sad moment for me. At Christmas my son got to come home for several days after moving to his new job last summer in Dallas. And my daughter was home from college. It was the first chance we'd all been together in month. We're sitting in the living room, with a chance to catch up. I look around the room. My wife is playing a game on her iPad, my daughter is on her computer reading gossip, and my son is texting on his iPhone. I'm being serious here, this was a truly sad moment for me. I sat there for about 5 more minutes and no one spoke to each other. I finally got up and went into my room and watched football, which I wasn't particularly interested in (which is easy when you're a Chiefs fan, lol.)

In all seriousness I think we are damaging our societies ability to communicate. I know this is a bit off topic, but our children and their children are learning that 80 characters, or what ever is allowed by text and tweet is the same thing as actually talking to someone. As I like to say, we moved from smoke signals, to telegraph to telephone to satellite and now we've moved back to telegraph. I truly do worry about this.