“Instead of continuing with the conversation, we all take out our phones and check them in earnest,” he said. “For a few minutes everybody is typing

away. A silence falls over the group and we all engage in a mass thumb-wrestling competition between man and little machine. Then the moment passes, the BlackBerrys and iPhones are reholstered, and we return to being humans again after a brief trance.”

And to think that I might be getting an HTC Thunderbolt this week...

That's a quote from an article about how it's fashionable to fool around on your phone and ignore people. That's an article about friends going out to dinner and then one person checks their phone and then everyone does at the same time. Classic.

Nother good line -- "The metrics of followers and retweets beget a kind of always-on day trading in the unstable currency of the self."

Gah and kind of a bummer one regarding conformity -- "When someone you are trying to talk to ends up getting busy on a phone, the most natural response is not to scold, but to emulate. It’s mutually assured distraction"