My daughter had her 18th birthday breakfast this morning, I was outside and when I walked in it was deadly silent, I looked over at the table they were sitting on, and six 17/18yo girls were all on their iphones scrolling thru and answering sms's and not one of them was talking to each other, is this normal?
Select to expand quotehardie said..
My daughter had her 18th birthday breakfast this morning, I was outside and when I walked in it was deadly silent, I looked over at the table they were sitting on, and six 17/18yo girls were all on their iphones scrolling thru and answering sms's and not one of them was talking to each other, is this normal?
You should have updated you facebook status (even better with a selfie) to show that you were in the same room...
No different then driving past a bus stop or a line up at the bank.
It's not limited to 18 year olds.
Hardie, the art of bumping the gums with mates/peers or whatever is dead to the young guns. This just isn't just isolated to girls/ladies, young fellas I find can be just as bad
Used to walk through lunch room, not uncommon to find half dozen sitting at table, all engrossed in smart phone process.
In the end, a few of us started to challenge them on what they were doing, asking questions like:
Is the person or data you are concentrating on with your phone mean more to you than one of these sitting here with you?
Got some very embarrassed sheepish looks I can tell you
We would follow up with, so what did you do on weekend/lastnight , to any one of the mob, then soon as we had them bumping the gums, would then get right into some nitty gritty on what they did, where they went and so on. We found within minutes the banter was that good, the phones were soon forgotten
Some of the relayed antics we had to walk away as 
and not just related to young guns, girls we found were just as eager to tell mates of antics.
So in the end, the conversations were rather good to hear as you walked through. No more like you experienced this morning.
They just needed some lead ins we found
^^^ I've had a few guys at work have a go at me during my break. They sit there reading a recycled grotty old food-laden newspaper that is full of 'old-news', spilling coffee over it and shuffling & rearranging the torn pages & swearing whilst I simply scroll through the news on my phone. Every now & then I get a look from one of them with a comment like - "how do you spend so much time staring at your phone?" I simply reply "shhhh, I'm reading the news - 21st century-style." (...and sometimes posting comments on SB). 
As an old fart I guess that the immediacy of face2face conversations could be scary.
If you haven't grown up with face2face interaction the lack of a "cut out" time to re-think the comment that you made, that went down like a lead ballon, and to fit out a reply might be intimidating.
But as communication becomes more and more similar to what we are doing now on this site I hope the young guns don't loose the skill of face2face dialogue with all of the necessary skills of understanding voice, face and body nuances to get the right message
