You beat me to the punch!

Indeed, plus it's a completely different social setting: public transport. Non sequitur all the way.

On the other hand, nobody who's busted out a newspaper on a train was talking to friends or family on the other end of it.

This is such a great idea for a response though. If in the middle of a conversation, and someone whips out their iPhone on you, BOOM...broadsheet

Of course, you have to try really hard to even find newspapers anymore, and people didn't "go out to dinner" carrying the paper, but yes, I do remember plenty a time when many people would lose themselves in the newspaper while at the table, for breakfast or lunch, both informal and not so informal settings. I guess I do "endorse the message behind that photo".

When I go out to eat with my Mom we usually have books/ereaders with us, and if we don't have anything to talk about, we read. We enjoy eachothers company without talking. There has been a few times when one of my sisters would join us and would offended when she took the impression that we didn't want to talk to her since we were reading rather than talking.

There is a difference of enjoying each other's company while being quiet and being rude while ignoring someone else. I wish some very talkative person wanting me to entertain them on the bus could have been entertained by their phone. I've often used books/ereaders/phone to keep others from talking to me (and enjoying reading of course). I think one major thing to discuss is not how much we're being distracted by technology, but more of how much priority we put on socializing face to face.

It seems similar to how you generally don't see people whipping out an iPad in the middle of dinner. It's easier to seem not-rude while using a phone, because it's smaller.

Well, the message behind the photo is to debunk the "Oh, if only we didn't have this tech, we would just talk to one another again." Reality simply is not like that.

That last statement (“Nobody pulled out…”) does not coincide with either my personal experience or the experience presented in some older television comedies where the husband is reading the newspaper as the wife is talking to him about something important and his response is “uh-huh” until the point she says something ridiculous or that he would never otherwise agree to. I'm pretty sure that “Married…with children” used this gag more than once.

I remember a time roughly 20 years ago when this was commonplace. Newspapers folded up into quarters (roughly today's tablet computer size, actually) and held on the lap waiting for a lull in conversation or when most of the table had gotten up to use the restroom.

I also remember that everyone had their own kind of 'roughly tablet-sized' time waster, including crossword books, Reader's Digest, novels, magazines, and yep, even TV Guide.

Over the years this had expanded to portable game systems like GameBoy, virtual pets like Tamagotchi, the original push e-mail devices like BlackBerry and so on. Hell, even when Timex came out with Indiglo watches I remember people used to pull out their watches and compare backlights the way people started to do the same with ringtones on feature phones.

However the modern smartphone is the amalgamation of all of these things into one. So in one sense the smartphone is really just an all-in-one version of the separate time-wasters.

The key difference that I see isn't just that "after you read the paper for the day, that's it, it's done" (and I do agree with you on this point), it's that the mobile phone (especially the smart phone) also enables a new application that wasn't previously possible: engaging in conversation with someone else than the person(s) you are physically next to.

No previous method of communication was portable like this with the potential to allow you to bypass a physical conversation so easily. And on top of that, since the phones have access to so many social connections, people seem to have unlimited opportunities to engage in long-distance conversations while ignoring those present physically.

But someone else rightly pointed out in another comment that the problem isn't so much that this is possible, but that our social norms haven't updated to make this a truly rude act. I just went to our friends' American Thanksgiving party and watched many conversations halt at any incoming mobile phone notification. Which I find doubly-rude: that the conversations on the phone seem prioritized over finishing an in-person exchange?

I think the best thing we can do is to just own the device we like, and practice the social etiquette that we hope others adhere to as well.