I was listening to a podcast recently where this topic came up with regards to the social pastime of jury duty. A man was being interviewed who lived during a t

I was listening to a podcast recently where this topic came up with regards to the social pastime of jury duty. A man was being interviewed who lived during a time before smartphones, and he retold that he really enjoyed going to jury duty because it was a chance for him to get to meet people in his city from all different backgrounds. There was a lot of waiting around, so people always talked to each other out of boredom. Now, whenever you go to jury duty and there's a waiting period of some sort, everyone is of course on their smartphones. The reason for this isn't just for the fact that there might be more interesting things happening on the web than in the quiet courtroom, but instead it's because the smartphone generation can "hang out" with people exactly like them 24/7. To me it seems like a cold optimization of your social graph aided by technology. It does some wonders for loneliness (it's amazing that I can hang out with my friends anywhere in the world at any time and they all have the same interests as me), but it's also causing a lot of deep societal problems. Echo chambers, de-emphasis on local affairs, an ever-widening gap of political viewpoints, and a horrible "grass is always greener" psychological effect.