Are We Making Us More Anti-Social And Rude?

How many times have you been out to dinner or other social function talking with people only to have them abruptly stop the conversation to answer their mobile or to respond to some form of text or email? How many times have you been in a meeting and experienced the entire meeting being momentarily disrupted by a phone call, even if you or the other person didn't actually answer it? Just the other night I got and deserved a lashing when I picked up my mobile to check email while waiting for dinner to arrive. Are the new modes of communication and social networks available to us making us more anti-social and rude?
Today we have the choice of voice, video, text, instant message, social networks, gaming networks, Skype, Google Voice, voice enabled Twitter and Facebook etc. These choices and the advances in mobile communication devices are responsible for this communication paradigm shift. The ability to take all this communication with you has changed us as much, or more, than the communication applications themselves. The way
The well known quote by Clay Shirkey, "it's not information overload, it's filter failure", applies but may not be enough. The communication and information is so readily available to us, wherever we are, that we just can't tear ourselves away from watching and responding. No amount of data or communication filtering can change this behavior if it fundamentally doesn't want to be changed. With all the tweeting and blogging I see about information overload, stress and anxiety, there are clear signs that we want it to change.
Communication systems need to evolve further to offer filtering and other forms of control. I've written before about consolidation of our identities, a unified communications dashboard and "agent" that can do this filtering. A couple of capabilities of a communication system that could help me be less rude and take control over interruptions