There was no alternative, other than the brief respite of a daydream, and later even a call on a portable phone called a mobile was simply a conversation and one that did not reduce the immediacy of our situation.

This has changed for huge numbers of people, and as I have seen in the past two weeks in Sydney the extent of that change is astounding. Every day, on trains and buses and lunchtime eateries and CBD footpaths and everywhere people gather, everybody bar the most elderly is absorbed by his or her smartphone, head down, finger jabbing or thumbs dancing.

To see hundreds of people with a bent-over head waiting for buses at a major Sydney CBD bus stop at the end of the business day, as my wife and I have, is an extraordinary sight, the sort of carefully assembled scene you would see in a movie.

How did we see them? Weren't our heads bent over the screen of a smart phone, finger jabbing? We witnessed this event, made special by the fact that not a single head was out of step, because we were not so absorbed, and we weren't so absorbed because we're from Newcastle.

Sure, many people of the Hunter region are besotted with their phone but here it is not the mass uniformity it seems to be in Sydney.

It is the sight in Sydney of train carriages full of people sitting or standing and bent over their screen that has led me to realise that these people are in another world when they flick their screen to life. Their screen life is one with many pages opened simultaneously, among them Facebook, music, games and any number of texted staccato conversations that very probably are of absolutely no consequence.

The physical world seems to fade to the status of an irritant, and even a call to the phone they're staring at is an intrusion.

It seems that the compulsion of young people especially to post selfies on social media is about confirming their presence in a physical world even while they're investing more of themselves in the digital world. It may be that the physical world is not real until it's recorded with a photo in the digital world.

This new and overwhelming preoccupation must change us. What, for example, is happening when young women post posed photos of themselves every day and their friends respond with such words as gorgeous, stunning, beautiful? Presumably the photo poster returns the favour. Is this creating and feeding a need for extreme positive reinforcement?

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It is easier, I think, for people to lie, to deceive or to be insincere in text than in person, and even more unfortunately it is easier to be aggressive and bullying in text than in person. A willingness to be deceptive and aggressive in the physical world may well increase with the use of those qualities in the digital world.

Smartphones allow people who've just met, or even who have not physically met, to be in contact day and night, and as we have seen in newspaper court reports when these relationships end in a crime the texting can be so frequent it is hard to see how either party could do anything else with the day.

It is clear that this capacity for continuous communication accelerates relationships, which may be a good thing if sex is the intended destination and probably not a good a thing for those with hopes of romance and more. When my wife and I met, in our mid 20s, neither of us had a phone in our respective flats and calls to work were often not possible or frowned upon, so to get in touch we had to find each other out and about. Had we met today we could be, and would be, communicating with each other every day and all day, from day one. I wonder if that would have changed the end result.

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Another impact of the obsession with the screen life is the almost total banishing of face-to-face interaction, which may be one of the attractions. People absorbed in their phone are excused from interaction and interruption, excused from even awareness of the presence of others; they see themselves as in another world and they are seen as being in another world.

Someone reading a book or newspaper is usually open to conversation or at least an exchange, and the title of the book will often be grounds to open a conversation.

I remember that my then teenage daughter a decade ago would become involved in a frenzy of texting whenever she was in the car with me and the purpose was, as she acknowledged, to discourage me from talking to her and thus requiring her to talk to me. Doesn't work with me, I used to say, but, strangely, it did.

When I see, as I have seen in Sydney this past fortnight, a mass flight to a separate world behind a small hand-held screen I believe that there must be a change in people. Good change or bad, significant or inconsequential, I don't know.

But I suspect that withdrawing increasingly from face-to-face communication is likely to reduce one of the crucial attributes for good human relations and community, the capacity for empathy.

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