How many times have you been walking down the street and seen a person walking toward you staring at their Smartphone without a clue that they about to run right into you.

How about the number of times you have tried to have a conversation with your spouse or your child and you feel like you are talking to yourself because they are surfing the web, watching U-Tube or playing with a new app.

 

Physically, we resides in our homes or home towns, but often times others would say we really live in a digital world, where Smartphone’s are more stimulating to some people than the life unfolding around them.

You see these tethered souls everywhere: The father joining in an intense Twitter debate at his daughter's dance recital. The woman cracking wise on Facebook while strolling through the mall.

Not to mention drivers staring down instead of through their windshields.

 

Physically, they are present. Mentally, they are elsewhere, existing as bits of data pinging between cell phone towers.

My wife has physically pulled my Blackberry out of my hands a couple times at the dinner table. I’ll admit it, having immediate access to e-mail and information is enticing. But more enticing than a conversation with my wife?

 

Doomsayers have long predicted that technological progress would turn us into shut-ins who rarely venture from our game-playing, IM-ing digital cocoons out into the physical world. But the stereotype of the computer-addicted recluse in the basement has been blown away; Smartphones make it possible to turn off the physical world while walking through it.

A recent Pew Research Center study found "a significant proportion of people who visit public and semipublic spaces are online while in those spaces." Parks. Libraries. Restaurants. Houses of worship. The doomsayers didn't foresee the portability that Smartphones bring to digital obsession. Nor did they foresee app stores.

 

The competition this digital world poses stretches into life's most intimate places. Elizabeth Sloan, a Washington marriage counselor, worked with a couple after the husband began surfing his Smartphone during sex.

"I wish I (were) joking," Sloan said. "This is a real hot topic right now for marriage counselors - and the complaints are coming from men and women. You hear this a lot: 'I can't reach you. I can't find you. You can be sitting two inches from me, but you are not there. Where are you?' Spouses are checking out at dinner, on vacation. It's really become a 24-7 thing."

Ask yourself. What are we doing? What are we escaping from? And where do I want to be?

Maybe this will enable us to have a real conversation and real connection our loved ones.

Keep the awareness high.