This is so true. There is another Psychology Today blog article called "Gadgetry=Emotional Imbecility" that also discusses this phenomenon, but in terms of social networking sites and the like. You should check it out.
Looking forward to reading more from you.

Interesting, because I have read the opposite: that people use cell phones to distance themselves from people around them. I used to despise cell phones, both for their social obnoxiousness and for their radiation. However, I read an article which stated that many people use cell phones to avoid being bothered. I thought it was a great idea! For grocery shopping, and other places where I wanted to tune out other people's impolite behavior, my cell provided a real escape for me. Of course one person's experience does not make for scientific evidence.

Vox is a blogging community that changed how I think of online interactions, as the best friends I've ever made have been hand picked to be in my online "neighborhood", and it's a web of social relationships, kind of like how you've built a web of posts that are to be read as a continuum. (Clever, by the way).

Great post, beautifully written.

technology and how we interact with it is one of my interests. the freud quote is interesting to me because of the antagonism between the forces that distance ourselves from each other and those same forces that tether us to each other. very much an elastic tether. we certainly use cell phones to keep our distance, but when there's a disaster, we seek each other out, if only for the briefest reassurance that the other is still there--somewhere. thanks for stopping in!

(by the way, my iPod's headphones are not always playing anything when i'm at the grocery store.)