The picture that comes to mind when imagining a silent disco suggests that the title of this column should have been "Alone Together". That title, however, was already taken - in 2011 by Sherry Turkle - so I had to find something else for this particular column. I'm not much of a Turkle fan, and I'm convinced that she credits our digital technologies for numerous human "flaws" that were around well before computers. In her latest, Reclaiming Conversation, for instance, she seems to assume that before the smartphone all families engaged in deep and meaningful dinner conversation and that our phones spoiled that ideal. The truth, however, is considerably more banal. Turkle is undoubtedly aware of TV dinners from the 1960s. These, or televisions, didn't destroy meaningful dinner conversation either. They're simply an earlier example of how Turkle's idealized past never really existed. But for some reason she chooses to ignore this.