Why Generation-Y Can't Read Nonverbal Cues

"In Silicon Valley itself, as the Los Angeles Times reported last year, some companies have installed the 'topless' meeting-in which not only laptops but iPhones and other tools are banned-to combat a new problem: 'continuous partial attention.' With a device close by, attendees at workplace meetings simply cannot keep their focus on the speaker. It's too easy to check email, stock quotes and Facebook. While a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as a silent dismissal. It announces: 'I'm not interested.' So the tools must now remain at the door.

Older employees might well accept such a ban, but younger ones might not understand it. Reading a text message in the middle of a conversation isn't a lapse to them-it's what you do. It has, they assume, no nonverbal meaning to anyone else.

It does, of course, but how would they know it? We live in a culture where young people-outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another-are ever less likely to develop the "silent fluency" that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to "read" the behavior of others, they are all thumbs."