Step away from your phone: the new rules of conversation

Why speak face to face when you can put it all in a text? Oliver Burkeman on reviving the lost art of real-time communication

Young people today, along with their Snapchat and their selfies and their sexting, apparently engage in a practice known as "phubbing". According to Sherry Turkle, the American sociologist of digital life, this involves maintaining eye contact with one person while text-messaging another. "My students tell me they do it all the time and that it's not that hard," she writes in her new book, Reclaiming Conversation. I nearly fell out of my wingback chair into my bowl of Werther's Originals.

Surely kids aren't incapable of concentrating on one other human being face to face? But I'm a hypocrite: the main reason I don't text while looking at someone else is just that I'd be terrible at it. Instead, I am always drifting away from a live conversation to check my iPhone under the table, or in the bathroom. When I see someone typing instead of interacting with someone at the supermarket checkout, I wince at the rudeness, because I'd never do that myself, unless it were really urgent" and yet it often does feel really urgent, so I do. Turkle's thesis, in short, rings troublingly true: we're more connected than ever, yet we talk - really talk - less and less.