It's implied in these types of articles that empathy has been permanently affected by technology. I believe cell phones are an invention with a time-limit.
Computers have been getting smaller not since you started using them, which for nontechnical folk might be the late 90s, but since the 50s. Each time they got smaller, they enabled different kinds of interaction.
I don't think we'll be using cell phones in 20 years. We've had computers, minicomputers, workstations, microcomputers, and we don't have a semantic niche for the cell phone, but I'd call it a nanocomputer. There will be femtocomputers.
