In Ohio, next door was a world away

This process brings with it unprecedented opportunities. Already, it is estimated that urban enclaves are responsible for one third of the global economy and almost all of its innovation.

However urbanisation also poses problems. For certain sections of modern societies, urbanisation combined with rapid digitisation - we live more and more of our lives online - is leading to higher levels of loneliness.

Studies show that urbanisation often increases levels of psychological stress, anxiety, confusion and fear for local populations. It is estimated that 25 percent of all Brits suffer from some kind of irrational fear. Some of these phobias are almost certainly boosted by the breakdown in social fabric that often accompanies rapid urban growth.

Alongside urbanisation, though, is the growing challenge of digitisation. As with the growth of the physical city, the spread of the 'digital city' presents wonderful benefits.

The expanding digital city, however, opens up huge questions about social identity and cohesion. In an age where more and more people derive at least part of their identity from their experience in the cyberworld, how can we produce communities in which people also feel vitally linked to the human beings around them?

Recently, Google released a video which shows a man leading a tour of the Hadron Super Collider in Switzerland for the benefit of an American school class, via the internet. As he cycles and walks through the immense tunnels that make up the facility, the guide sends video to the class via the camera built into his shiny new Google Glass specs.

As he inspects the machinery around him, the guide also watches a live video feed of the classroom, which is showing in one corner of his vision.

Is this the way we will converse in the imminent future? Under the influence of Google Glass - no doubt a wonderful innovation in other respects - will we learn to ignore someone standing beside us, while chatting with people we alone can see?

We've quickly learned to do this with mobile phones, but how much worse will our social intercourse become when we can, while on the move, see as well as hear remote interlocutors?

And how distracted will we become? (In some parts of the US,  police have introduced fines for people caught texting while walking down the street.)

Will tragedies like the ones in Ohio and Austria occur more often in the near future, partly because people are paying less attention to their immediate environments and the people in them?

There is no direct link between peoples' use of communications technology and the horrific situation of the three young women in Ohio. The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the perpetrators.

Yet the story serves as a useful reminder of how important it is that we each live and pay attention within our physical space and not just the virtual one. Society only functions when we each stay fully aware of our real-time environment; when we each learn to say, 'I am society'.

It might already be time to ask ourselves: 'If my smartphone, tablet or laptop broke down tomorrow, would I still have any friends and would I still know what's going on in my world?'