In a recent episode of “Modern Family,” character Claire Dunphy, a mother, is appalled to find her family absorbed in electronic devices during breakfast—from her husband’s preoccupation with his iPad to her son playing on his Nintendo DS. “You’re all so involved in your little gizmos, nobody is even talking,” she tells them. “Families are supposed to talk!” One daughter immediately texts to her sister across the table: “Mom’s insane.” Insane or not, the phenomenon is real. Family members, even when spending time in the same room, often are engrossed in whatever form of technology each can hold in his or her hands—from phones or iPods to handheld video games. “The transformation of the American living room into a multi-screen communication and entertainment hub [could] change our domestic sphere,” says Lutz Koepnick, a media professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “Individual family members might find themselves contently connected to parallel worlds almost all the time.” Some find the trend problematic, but others think it’s not that much different from what happened with another entertainment revolution—the novel. “If you go back 200 years, there were similar complaints about technological devices, but it was books at that time,” Koepnick says. “The family room filled with different people reading books created a lot of concerns and anxiety.” (New York Times)