Christine Rosen has a great term, "egocasting," to describe the enclosed, self-preferring world of RSS feeds, music, and news that we cue up for ourselves. One of the things that egocasting does is encourage us to interact with that often-comforting, often-distracting world instead of people around us or our immediate surroundings. Sports Illustrated has a nice piece about how this is affecting team cohesion in professional sports:

Ask many coaches, general managers and older players and you'll hear a common gripe: chemistry on teams has been altered because of modern technology, and not for the better. The rise of smartphones, with all their instant-communication and entertainment options, have created insular worlds into which distracted players too often retreat instead of bonding with teammates….

"There are times I get frustrated, as an older manager," said Ottawa Senators GM Bryan Murray, 68. "You get on the bus after a game and look back, and all you see are guys on their cellphones. Whether they're calling their agent or a guy on another team, I don't know. It may be to their wife, but more than likely to somebody else. Sometimes it's about getting too much ice time, but most of the time it's about not getting enough ice time or some other issue."…

"When you get on the bus now to go to a game, everybody's got their headphones on, or staring at their phones instead of sitting there talking," said former NHL defenseman Rob Blake, who retired last year and now works in the league's front office. "But now where I've seen [a difference] most is in the dressing rooms. You always had a team stereo, and you always had one guy put the music on and you always had a team song. Now, guys have their own headphones. You don't even really need a team stereo anymore, because they're all listening to their own music."

Not to pick on professional hockey: managers in baseball, football coaches, and basketball players all report similar things in their own sports:

Reminiscing recently to the Quincy (Mass.) Patriot-Ledger about the 25th anniversary of his 1985-86 Boston Celtics' NBA championship team, Hall of Famer Bill Walton seemed grateful that he played when he did.

"It was a very close team, on and off the court,'' Walton told the newspaper. "It was an era that predated smartphones and headphones (though the first commercially available cellular phones came in 1983).

"We played together, practiced today, lived together. We celebrated together. We did everything together. What Larry [Bird] set up for us at the Scotch 'N Sirloin after the games, all the events we went to together, the road trips, we spent all of our time together. We were always going out to dinner, to the movies. We were always just doing fun stuff."