Observation-technology & communication

Recently my family took a long weekend and took in a few baseball games and other activities. Oddly one of the most humorous things I noticed was the change in what the kids priorities were.
I remember taking extended vacations with my aunt and uncle and two cousins. We couldn't wait to get to the hotel and it seemed to take even longer because my aunt and uncle loved the scenic route to everything! But once we arrived we took enough time to squeeze our suitcases in the door, rip open our bags and grab our swim suits. Had to hit the pool! Had to be ready for the pool before my aunt and uncle got too settled into something else.
Flash forward, we've been at a ballgame and it's late into the evening and we've squeezed in the door of our hotel room. The kids have mentioned swimming but not 30 seconds after we're in the door, all four of us are walking around with a cell phone in one hand and the charger in the other as if our lives depended on finding a power source. As we all vie for a plug-in and you know how there's never enough in a hotel room...
I had to chuckle to myself.
We took a little weekend trip to have some family time and communicate at a different level but it was almost as if we didn't charge that cell phone we wouldn't be able to speak.
I know cell phones are a communication vehicle but I also wonder if they aren't the roadblock to communication too. We text instead of converse therefore losing some of the emotion involved. It's hard to get a read on someones "lol" if you can't hear it in their voice.
I often wonder what sort of communicators we will be in the future? We don't let the media deliver a broad brush of subjects, we like to narrow our "search" for items of interest. Will that make us too narrow minded and too narrow knowledgeable? Will we only learn more about the things that intrigue us but then maybe we would be missing something else that would interest us because we never knew about it or further investigated?
Will manners become a thing of the past because the world we know comes from a screen instead of human interaction?