"They didn't notice"

You looked down, they carried on talking, nothing was said. So they didn't notice, or didn't mind.

They noticed. People who are talking to you watch your face, because that's what talking to someone is. It isn't a broadcast. It's a thing done to a face that answers back, and every sentence is shaped by what the face is doing. When the face goes to a screen, the sentence changes, and the person changes it without deciding to.

Children make the noticing visible, because they haven't yet learned to hide it. Jenny Radesky and colleagues watched fifty-five caregivers eating with young children in fast food restaurants and wrote down everything that happened. Forty of them used a phone during the meal. What the observers saw most clearly was absorption, the degree to which the adult's attention was in the device rather than with the child. And the children responded to the absorption along a range. Some entertained themselves. Others escalated, louder, more insistent, climbing, until they got a look. The most absorbed adults, when the child's behaviour finally reached them, often responded harshly.

That's what noticing looks like at four. At fourteen it looks like one-word answers. At forty it looks like "anyway", and a change of subject, and a story that gets told to somebody else. The signal gets quieter as people get older, and it's easy to mistake quiet for not minding.

Chotpitayasunondh and Douglas's finding fits here too. The path from the partner's phone use to the worse conversation ran through feeling less that you belong. Belonging isn't a thing people announce the loss of. It's a thing they go quiet about.

My interpretation is that nobody says anything because saying "you're on your phone" feels petty, and feeling petty is worse than feeling ignored. So they don't say it. They just tell you a little less next time.