‘Or, worse yet they are talking to someone next to them but they are doing it through text.’

I was a front-end manager for a big box store and witnessed this first hand. The older workers like myself would sit and talk, pretty much any subject that came up we had an opinion. The younger workers would sit by themselves and text, often to the person next to them just like you said. Every so often we would try to engage one or more of them in conversation. You could see the visible discomfort of actually talking to another human as opposed to quietly texting. Not all of them were into total texting and seemed to enjoy spoken-word conversation but they were few and far between. While I am glad to see some of the improvements technology has provided society I am just as saddened by the decline of meaningful, personal face to face conversation.