I’d first become aware of it on rush hour commuter train journeys from my home in Connecticut into NYC’s Grand Central. Whereas, once upon a not-so-distant time, everyone in the morning would have their heads buried in a New York Times or Wall Street Journal – some even wore gloves to keep the ink off their fingers – nowadays there’s nary a newspaper in sight. Today they’re probably accessing the same news sources, but it’s strictly via smartphones and tablets.

Then this week, I inadvertently did something that clearly dated me as borderline Neanderthal: I walked into a Hudson News concession at Charleston International Airport (SC) and, after searching in vain, asked if they had any newspapers. Clearly highly amused, the rotund lady behind the counter heartily chuckled out a response of, “Oh NO honey. We ain’t had those for a long time now.”

So, newsprint-free, I headed for the bar to kill some time before my flight back to New York. Have you ever noticed how, if you give yourself lots of extra time to handle long lines at security, you can count on there being none? Anyway, spying an unoccupied stool in the nondescript U-shaped bar, I found myself facing about 10 other hardened ‘road warrior’ types. Without exception, every one of them was totally transfixed with their phones. Even the two couples who were traveling together, weren’t exchanging a word – unless maybe they were texting each other!

Sadly, there’s nothing remotely unusual about this. It’s just the world in which we live. And in the interests of full disclosure, I was almost guilty of doing the same thing before a sudden flash of inspiration saw me pull out my laptop and start to write this piece. And the thought that inspired this rush to write? Well, I’d simply wondered, “What the hell would these people have been doing with themselves in this same place 15 years ago?”

Why 15 years you ask? Well, while the iPhone may seem to have been a part of our lives forever, incredibly, Steve Jobs didn’t deliver the first one until 2007. We’d played around with other clunky Motorola and Blackberry variants before then, but it was really the arrival of the iPhone that changed everything. Almost overnight, we morphed from a species that spoke to each other – verbal intercourse used to be almost as popular as the other kind – to a state of techno-induced messaging overload, wherein verbal communication (aka ‘conversation’) has rapidly gone the way of the dinosaur.

Perhaps my first confrontation with where this, not so brave, new world of digital interlocution was going, came about a dozen years ago while driving one of my kids to a hockey game. My then 11 or 12-year-old son, sitting in the back of the car, had been texting furiously, and then, to no one in particular, he exclaimed “Why doesn’t he answer me? I know he’s there!” When, naively, I suggested “Why don’t you just call him?” it brought an incredulous retort of, “Dad! You mean like, call him… like on the phone?” Then, with an almost disgusted sigh, “No way. That would be so uncool!” But more on this later.

According to ‘DataReportal’, North Americans spend a little over seven hours a day staring into our various-sized screens – that’s around 45 minutes longer than the average Brit, but well behind the world champion: South Africans win hands down at a staggering 11 hours!

So, what on earth did we all do with ourselves before these alien devices took over our waking hours?

Well in the travel world, particularly in airports and on airplanes most of us were never much into striking up conversations with strangers. I once sat next to a guy in first class from Tokyo to LAX, and then found myself next to him again on the connection from LAX to JFK. I swear, we didn’t utter more than a dozen words on the entire trip. Now that was being a real travel pro!

Back to that airport bar though, 15 years earlier we would probably have been idly staring into space or at the soundless TV, reading newspapers, books, work stuff or magazines.

Magazines are the interesting one. Just as people will drink tomato juice only when they’re on airplanes, I’d regularly pick up random titles in airport newsstands that I’d never buy in the outside world. ‘Wired’ and ‘Esquire’ were frequent purchases. I also liked Vanity Fair which always had some great articles, but I was always a bit concerned that it looked too much like I was reading a woman’s publication, unlike titles like ‘The Economist’ which created a much more machismo impression. I remember I once bought a copy of something called ‘Mental Floss’ which claimed to make you smarter “one bit of trivia at a time.” I’m not sure it delivered on the promise.

Another way I used to pass the time waiting in airports was simply enjoying the great ‘people watching’ theater that one finds in gate areas. People are inherently afraid of flying, and this plays out in all kinds of ways – mostly through grim facial expressions that are akin to someone awaiting the arrival of their executioner.

But back in that airport bar. I asked the bartender, a man in his 60’s, how long he’d been doing the job and he told me he’d been there almost 20 years. So, with a discrete nod to the guy sitting next to me who hadn’t stopped thumbing away at his phone since he sat down, I asked, “And how have things changed in that time?” With a wry grin he shook his head and replied, “Well, one thing’s for sure, people used to drink a lot more before they had those damned things to distract them.”

So, on cue, for old time’s sake, I ordered another drink and dutifully watched CNN with the sound off. Ah yes, those were the days!