Antisocial networking

On Friday night my wife and I were lucky to be able to watch Derren Brown's new show Svengali at the Edinburgh Playhouse. The whole audience were sworn to secrecy, so I can't tell you any more about the contents of the gig, but an interesting thing happened at the interval.
Two early-twenties women were sitting directly in front of us, and at the moment the curtain came down on the first half, both produced touchscreen phones from their handbags and spent the next fifteen minutes engrossed in Facebook. My wife commented that she found it strange that two people would go out of an evening together, to spend the time when they could be talking to each other in a social-networking bubble each.
There is one image that I have found particularly memorable from the Pixar movie Wall-E; aside from the environmental message, more powerful for me is the image of future humans, bloated from excess and lack of exercise, going about the place on a kind of hover-chair, obvilious to the world around them because of the screens that are in front of their faces. It's particularly compelling imagery given that Steve Jobs, purveyor of touchscreens of various sizes these days, is one of the primary backers behind the film company.
Since joining Microsoft, one of the things that I have struggled with most is that everybody seems to take laptops to meetings. The result is a combination of psychological barriers (both physical and metaphorical), not to mention a kind of corporate ADHA where nobody's attention ever appears to be completely in the room (even if all the particpants are). Having been working in a place where nobody took their laptops anywhere (one small bonus to there not being effective wi-fi), it's a shock to the system. I have heard some say that tablet-form devices are less intrusive in such scenarios, but only where there is one tablet where the lack of a keyboard can allow the screen to be shared.
All of this makes me wonder what we will see emerge as form-factors for computing devices in the coming decade. The world is currently obsessed with touchscreen devices, but this is just a phase we are going through (don't get me wrong – the touchscreen isn't going to go away, it's just that I don't believe it will be the only form, nor necessarily ultimately the most dominant).
But what would the ultimate device form look like that would enable interactivity and the consumption of content, but wouldn't be so socially destructive in a physical social circumstance? One of the key factors, it seems to me, would be the necessity for it to be a shared, rather than personal device. It amazes me that interactive whiteboards seem to have had no take up outside of the education sector, and there they are used as a transmission mechanism rather than a multiple-participant device. In fact, I struggle to think of any good examples of computer technologies that allow for people in the same place to be able to collaborate together at the same time…