More public spaces should block phone signals

Sharing ideas, projects and even values is an inherently social thing. To some degree, we need physical proximity to pull it off.

In the workspace, studies suggest a growth in another phenomenon called "time starvation". People feel unable to switch off after work because they're anchored to their work via the internet and their phones and tablets.

This inability to leave work behind often carries with it higher levels of anxiety, guilt and restlessness, all of which are costing American business an estimated $40 billion per year in lost productivity.

Meanwhile, a greater engagement with digital gadgets and particularly social media platforms is leading to social disinhibition.

The rather cumbersome name refers to the fact that people will sometimes say things online that they wouldn't dare say offline.

Last year, a study found that two percent 2000 Brits said they had insulted someone they didn't know online in the last year. These people were not trolls; just average folks who felt freer to be insulting in the cybersphere than they would in real life.

Two percent of 2000 people doesn't sound like much, but if it could be extrapolated across the entire nation, it would mean that one million people were insulting people they didn't know online. Digital connections can help build or maintain relationships, but they can also help destroy social cohesion.

Another challenge presented by digitisation is the growing tendency for people to build transactional relationships with machines.

My wife and I have been married for 36 years this month. Over the years, we have formed a transactional partnership.

We each tend to specialise in different forms of everyday information. We each remember different things and perform certain everyday tasks better than the other. Combining our interests, skills and natural tendencies allows us to get things right, at least some of the time.

There is growing evidence that a similar phenomenon is emerging in the way each of us treats digital gadgets and their connection to the Cloud. We don't remember what we read on the internet, we store in on platforms like Evernote and Pocket and rely on machines to remember it for us.

Because the information is not being stored in long-term human memory, it is of no use in producing future innovation. New ideas are always born out of connections between old (stored) ideas.