I USED to think that the earphone pieces that came with my phone were meant for each of my ears. Apparently not.

Two weeks on holiday with two teenagers has taught me otherwise.

They’re so that two people can listen to a piece of music together, carry on a conversation and text at the same time.

For them an experience isn’t a reality until it’s shared in words, pictures and text-speak. The phone that does everything – plays music, takes pictures, surfs the net, sends texts has transformed their world into aspace that they share with each other and, from which wrinklies like myself, are excluded.

Am I old or is everyone else is getting younger? The world has moved on and seems to have left me behind; I feel like I’m sitting on a train in a station and realising that the train I wanted to be on has just left from another platform.

Is a gig still a gig if you don’t Instagram it? If you don’t log your gym session will your cardiovascular capacity still increase? Is an untweeted thought worth anything? When I was younger my parents disapproved of my music.

But that’s because they had to listen to it. Today I have little idea what my children listen to, or watch or with whom they communicate. Today’s technology means that they carry their world and their friends around with them.

Some years ago a French philosopher commented that public space had become privatised, shopping malls had replaced public parks, that public transport defined us as individual customers rather than collective passengers, that listening to music and taking part in mass entertainment had now become an individual rather than shared activity.

“The Walkman Generation” he called it.

The mobile phone has taken his privatised world to new levels. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not hankering after a golden age or lamenting the youth of today.

I just have this sneaking feeling that the way young people use technology will change how they see the world and the way they interact with it.

This summer I was lucky enough to visit Salzburg, celebrating 50 years since the filming of the Sound of Music.

“Fraulein Maria’s Sound of Music Cycling Tours” takes you on an escorted cycle of the city and into the countryside, visiting the sites used in the film.

There was something refreshingly companionable about mixing with 30 people aged from six to 60 from seven different countries speaking five languages, cycling around together, losing their reserve and singing songs from the film in their original locations.

It was interestingly to realise that even the teenagers in our party said that the cycle tour was one of the highlights of the holiday.

Perhaps my fears for their future and the loss of simple face to face human interaction across cultures and generations are groundless?