I feel like when people write this they completely forget what life was like in college.
It's true that ever since the newspaper we've had trouble interacting with each other in certain contexts. Why does that difficulty seem to dramatically increase post-college?
Sure, when I was in college tons of people including myself used their phone in public. But there was a corresponding amount of more or less random and constant public interaction.
To me, this suggests that the problem has little to do with phones or newspapers or watches and everything to do with the design of a city. College campuses are human-scale; modern cities are not. College students are encouraged to room together and give up materialistic wealth; college graduates and working professionals are encouraged to spend as much of their net worth as they can on procuring their own private abode. College students can walk mostly anywhere they need to go; working professionals usually drive in armored vehicles for a significant portion of the day and often find that virtually nothing useful is in walking distance of their residence except other residences that they aren't allowed to approach without good reason.
There were plenty of discussions about human-scale cities here on HN (and I hope to see more of them) :)
One oft-quoted title is Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language", which advocates several building and design patterns, and ended up picked up mostly by the software engineering community.
You're completely right. Sorry, I should have been clearer. My conception of the "modern city" is very biased by the cities I've personally experienced, which are all US cities with the exception of Moscow (which I would rank as the most livable city I've ever personally lived in, due to its public transportation infrastructure and general density).
It's true that ever since the newspaper we've had trouble interacting with each other in certain contexts. Why does that difficulty seem to dramatically increase post-college?
Sure, when I was in college tons of people including myself used their phone in public. But there was a corresponding amount of more or less random and constant public interaction.
To me, this suggests that the problem has little to do with phones or newspapers or watches and everything to do with the design of a city. College campuses are human-scale; modern cities are not. College students are encouraged to room together and give up materialistic wealth; college graduates and working professionals are encouraged to spend as much of their net worth as they can on procuring their own private abode. College students can walk mostly anywhere they need to go; working professionals usually drive in armored vehicles for a significant portion of the day and often find that virtually nothing useful is in walking distance of their residence except other residences that they aren't allowed to approach without good reason.