My attention was drawn to this curious and unlikely state of affairs when the person with whom I was engaged in a rather interesting conversation - about recent successes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, if you must know - interrupted me in mid-sentence, to remark indignantly that I seemed to be preoccupied with my own phone.

Preoccupied? Hardly. I was expecting to hear from a friend who was due to meet me there, so while we were chatting I had glanced down for but the merest of instants to check my text messages. All right, I might have skimmed my Twitter feed too. And Facebook updates. And the latest AP and Engadget headlines. But that was it! I was completely committed to our conversation - where was the problem?

The tables had been turned at another party I'd dropped in on earlier that same evening. I'd been invited by a former housemate, who is a few years younger than I am. It was his girlfriend's birthday party - and she was a good few years younger than him. There, I was old.

And, in the field of multitasking, completely out of my depth. These youngsters were not only completely relaxed about their companions' constant phone activity, but were engaging with each other on several levels at once, never interrupting their flirty conversational flow - even as they snapped photos and sent Facebook messages to the very same people they were talking to.

And these were adults, in their 20s. And not even especially geeky young adults, at that. God knows how many layers of supertext today's teenagers are slathering their own interactions with.

To those of us who haven't grown up with always-on access to everything in the whole world ever, this shift to perpetual social multitracking is at once offensive and alien.

But it's perfectly natural to the kids - and to those of us with severe attention deficit disorders, who are finally able to endure social engagements without feeling like our heads are going to explode from the sheer effort of trying to contain our focus to a single thread of conversation.

Sure, I felt a little uneasy surrounded by the switched-on youngsters performing virtual social acrobatics around me, just as the folks at the later soiree were annoyed by my antisocial faux pas. But bearing in mind that the world isn't just constantly changing - the actual rate of change is constantly increasing - there's not much that can be done.

This week Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, told a crowd at a mobile conference in Spain that the rate of uptake on smartphones was eight times faster than Internet uptake 10 years ago. At the same trade show, several companies announced cellphone services that offered instant foreign language voice translation.

A Japanese company has unveiled a cellphone that can be operated just by wiggling your eyes at it. It's nuts. The ways we are accessing worlds beyond the material are getting crazier and crazier - of course this is going to disrupt social etiquette!

You think you can stop the tide just by being passive aggressive? Oh, but fear not. There's hope for a return to discretion yet. Brain implant technology is getting more and more advanced: In a few years the only visible sign that those pesky kids aren't paying proper attention to what we're saying will again be that which it always was: Glazed-over eyes.