Yesterday I talked with a woman on Metro. Nothing much, just a small conversation. But any pleasant exchange is a surprise when people are packed so close together. She was sitting on the aisle and the man she’d been sharing her seat with had just missed his stop. “I wish he’d told me that he needed to get out,” she said. I nodded politely. After all, I’d just taken the seat he had vacated. I was glad he was gone.

As she explained more, I learned that the man may have assumed she was getting up because she was putting her magazine away. He was trying to read her body language and (perhaps I’m making him more deferential than he actually was) save her from standing up sooner than she needed to. Was he, too, leaving cues about his intentions, cues that she wasn’t picking up?

But then she said more. “We have all this technology. We have email and cell phones and computers. But we still don’t know how to communicate.”

I would take it a step further. Perhaps we don’t communicate because we have the technology. It keeps our gaze down at our palm instead of outward, toward each other.