Cellular telephones … seem relatively harmless. With them, though, we separate each human from every other, and from their common humanity, by allowing them to ‘keep in touch’ (how does on not laugh?), maintaining their endless chatter at a conversational level of minimal sentience and maximum banality, feeding their narcissism while allowing them to be rude to two people simultaneously: the person to whom they are speaking and the other directly in front of them.

—Richard Platt, As One Devil to Another, 127-8.