"They're only telling me about their day"

The story is ordinary. A meeting, a queue, a thing the teacher said, what happened on the bus. Nothing in it requires your full attention, and you'd give your full attention if something did.

Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein ran two experiments on what a phone in view does to a conversation between two people, and found it hurt closeness and connection and conversation quality, most clearly when the topic was personally meaningful. Shalini Misra and colleagues had a hundred pairs talk for ten minutes about either a casual or a meaningful topic while an observer noted whether either person had a phone on the table or in their hand. Conversations with no phone in sight were rated better, and the people in them reported more concern for each other. I should say plainly that the mere presence part of this is disputed. John Crowley and colleagues tried to repeat Przybylski and Weinstein's study and found no effect of a phone in view, and they thought changing norms might be why. This book isn't about phones in view. It's about phones in use, where the findings in chapter 3 are on firmer ground. But I mention the meaningful-topic result because of what it implies. The effect is biggest where the stakes are highest, and the ordinary story is where the stakes hide.

Here's why. The account of the day isn't information. It's how people stay known to each other. The meeting story is a way of saying "this is what I'm dealing with", and "the teacher said" is a child's way of saying "this is what my world is like". The point of the ordinary story isn't the point of the story. It's that someone wanted to tell it to you, and the telling is where the closeness is made and kept. Nobody opens with the thing that matters. They open with the queue, and watch what your face does, and decide from that whether to go on.

So the ordinary story is the audition for the meaningful one. Glance during it, and the meaningful one doesn't get told. If your version of this problem is that you're listening with your eyes up but composing your own answer while they talk, that's an earlier book, You were waiting to talk. The version here is simpler and more visible. The eyes went down.