Your point is valid, but assumes I have a deep enough social pool that I can drop friends and replace them with more compatible communicators. That might or mig

Your point is valid, but assumes I have a deep enough social pool that I can drop friends and replace them with more compatible communicators. That might or might not be true, but I’m hesitant to test it. I like my friends, other than their stubborn refusal to embrace my anachronistic tendencies. I think by talking about myself I distracted from my intended point though, which is the experience of being a child in the age of smart phones. The sense of freedom and adventure of being a teen away from home seems incompatible with having an internet connected device on one’s person. An anecodte: My neighbors are totally reasonable people. Their teenage daughter was an hour late home from school one day, and not answering her phone. They started canvassing the neighborhood, driving her usual route home, checking to see if any neighbors had seen her. She was fine, she went to get a burger with some friends and her phone was out of batteries. Nothing about that story strikes me as unreasonable today, but when I was a teenager it would have seemed a ridiculous overreaction. Kids had impromptu hangouts regularly. Rarely would they phone home. Most parents were gone until after 5:00 anyway. Our culture has changed in a direction that feels sad to me. I feel like something has been lost. It’s clear that this is a minority view on HN. Hopefully that means the average person experiences phone culture as a positive change.