Okay guys, here's a first. I'm actually going to agree with Speed on something, which I will get to in a minute.
A year or so ago, the wife and I stopped for lunch in a local restaurant south of Seattle. While the food was good and the restaurant staff did a good job, it was another group that arrived soon after we did that really caught our interest.
This group, of roughly a dozen people of all ages, was led to a long table close to where the wife and I were sitting, no big deal. They all looked at their menus which was, again, no big deal. They all placed their order with the waitress, who then headed away to place the orders with the kitchen. So far, everything was normal for a group at a restaurant.
At this point, however, everything changed. Every person in that group pulled out a smart phone and started banging away on the keys, sending text after text to who knows where. Not one person said a word after that, not even to the waitress who had brought out their orders. The wife and I were, in a word, stunned by these people. Another customer, on her way out, actually commented about the lack of conversation. One of the older members of the group looked up at her, for less than a second, and went back to texting. Less than half an hour after getting their food, the group had finished eating and, still banging away on their phones, got up and left. The conversation around the dining room quickly switched to talking about this group. We all knew they could speak, as well as hear, since they had all interacted with the waitress until after she had taken their orders. One person referred to the group mas "Binars", after a race of characters from the TV series Star Trek, The Next Generation. The Binars, quickly explained, are a race that had integrated themselves with electronics, becoming what amounted to a form of cyborg.
This is where Speed and I agree on something. Many people, like this group of diners, have become very introverted in how they live their lives. Conversation, as it's always been known, has been replaced by sterile texting, taking out any emotion and personal interaction. The closest thing to a true tonal change, showing an emotional response, is the use of a smiley face of some sort. Not having to be face to face or, for that matter, even having to talk to one another is a way to protect one's self from any sort of confrontation. That has me wondering, what would happen if the cell towers all failed in an area? In the story about the Binars, their main computer went down due to a solar flair, requiring the assistance of humans to save their race from dying. Could this same fate be awaiting us in the not so distant future? A society of introverts that won't know how to communicate without their smart phones trying to work together to repair or rebuild society from some sort of electronic meltdown?