Technology and communication

Consider this situation: your flight has been delayed by two hours because of a snowstorm, and you are getting tired of listening to the same songs over and over again on your iPod. You are trying to sample people around you to find a decent match: someone with whom you can start a reasonable conversation. How do you know whether or not a person, in fact, is a good match? You usually look for a signal that helps you separate one person from the rest of the crowd, which includes physical appearance, speech, and virtually everything else that your senses can capture. Even though they say that eyes are the window to the soul, it fails miserably in the current situation! Books can help unravel some mystery in these circumstances: it seems there is some evidence that you can form a rough idea of someone's mental state by looking at what he or she is reading. I think this is also true at the subconscious level: the signal that you want to send out probably has some influence on your book selection for an upcoming air travel. I wonder how this is going to change with the advent of ebooks and readers. Until now, figuring out what someone is reading was relatively easy: you just had to look at the cover of the book. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case with these new gadgets out there. Are these shutting off an interesting channel of communication between complete strangers? Who knows!!