alternative view coffee shop scene,, young couple enjoying life,, just left hotel,,enjoying breakfast and each others company while takin' opportunity to use free wifi before moving on and enjoying rest of their day together,, elderly single observer sat alone fretting on perceived absence of social interaction of others!! lol

Isn't a forum post, dedicated to complaining about too much communication, professing to wanting real meaningful face to face conversations by eliciting responses from anonymous, faceless, strangers, itself a form of too much communication?

Isn't the discussion self defeating? One does not muse about the quality of fast food restaurant food while at McDonald's and then attempt to get other patrons to agree that fast food is crap.

So alien, if you get rid of iPhones, couples will suddenly all have deep bonds and meaningful conversations in restaurants? Human beings had dysfunctional behaviour long before phones were invented.

@dolphin: Answer is no, of course, but it's possible to create more or less dysfunctional environments, including psycho-social ones.
@satirical: no and no, it's not too much, it's a kind of communication that can help one understand communication. I'm not saying that communication is bad, or that writing is bad or necessarily a useless form of communication, I'm saying that it can be self-defeating to get so knee-jerk used to spurious and supercilious substitutes that one may be in danger of forgetting what it's like. Like, say, confusing a movie about war with war itself, or a carefully-manufactured tv image of a politician, on the one hand, with the character or ability or intentions of a person and political party and his/her/their powerful supporters who are running, through an election perhaps, to control an entire nation, on the other.
And I think also it's nice to be aware of actual trees or mountains out there, and not just see them on the nature channel or as backdrops for somebody's (perhaps one's own) selfie - witness people who "love" whales or music idols who've never even seen one. Images are fine, as long as you know they're images, and now we have simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. It may not all be new, but it's getting pretty damned intense.

@alienV2.0

But who is getting "knee-jerk used to spurious and supercilious substitutes"? It seems you are judging and condemming people you don't even know based on a glimpse of their public behavior / persona, it would appear that you are the one confusing "simulacra" for the real thing.

If someone is mistaking movies or video games for real life then there is a far greater problem than "too much communication" and taking away the medium isn't going to solve that problem.

Not many people are as privileged as you to be able to look at a picture of an whale and decide to go look at the real thing, for some, the image is as close to the real thing as they are ever going to get. Who are you to point fingers and say you are foolish for taking the image to be the real thing.

And are you sure the "real" object you seek is any more authentic than the image? Can you say definitively that the real object isn't itself some facsimile of another object?

"Can you say definitively that the real object isn't itself some facsimile of another object?"

Wow, neoplatonism. Haven't come across that for a while. How interesting. :)

@ Satirical, your questions:

(1) I worry that many or all of us are, and I'm not condemning people (why does everyone online seem to make a point to take everything personally, or to attack the personalities or supposed motivations behind ideas, which are irrelevant if they can't deal with the ideas themselves, in their own right?) but questioning the actual effects on people of a particular socio-psychological environment which has expanded by leaps and bounds in recent years. Seems it's worthwhile to try and understand its effects - I don't think anybody would claim that it doesn't have any.
(2) I'm not pointing fingers at individuals, I'm trying to point out that, to a great extent, the medium really is the message, as Marshall McLuhan told us all some 50 years ago.
(3) No, and so the very idea of 'reality' and 'authenticity' becomes ambiguous. Some realities are produced to manipulate people, you know (e.g., advertising, lies, conscious and intentional distortions of what the speaker believes), and it would be absurd to imagine that it's only done through words.
(4) No.

This "i'm right you're wrong" back n' forth is the egoic undoing of modern communication. More often than not a tool for reaffirming our preconceived biases than to learn from adversarial, opposing view.

True all too often - yet we must come to some mutual agreement about the nature of reality if we're going to live and function within it, whatever it is. So let judgement rest on the logic of the better argument and the evidence that relates to it, regardless of personal issues that are better dealt with by human beings when they're face to face. This thing here is just a tool sitting on a worktable, we live elsewhere. Or can, anyway.

What is it exactly, @Alien, do you wish to accomplish with this pointless discussion?

People do what they want to do, percieve what they want to perceive, what is it to you? And when you say "many of us are" please speak for yourself. Just because you are doesn't mean everyone is.

If you are trully concerned about humanity's future, please take meaningful action to make it better rather than mouthing off anonymously to total strangers as you always do. For someone so against virtual and faux social interactions, you do spend an inordinate amount of time engaging in it.