A confession. I carry a huge amount of electronic toys with me wherever I go. I commute an hour each way every day, and I use those hours to read, and listen to music, and watch films, and delete e-mails, and manage tasks, and play games, because it’s precious time and I want to squeeze some value out of it. However, by cutting myself off from my fellow commuters I withdraw my energy and awareness from them, and I suspect I become a little less pleasant to be around.

I have sat on the Tube glued to my Archos portable video player only to look up and see to my shame that a heavily pregnant women has been standing in front of me for half an hour. I’ve left my iPod behind and been forced to stand with unprotected ears and endure the belligerent schizoid drum and bass sounds leaking from the earphones of the person standing next to me, but next day have been broadcasting my own noise pollution in exactly the same way.

I’ve tried, although admittedly without much commitment, to open my laptop on the Tube and read some e-mail, to the annoyance and discomfiture of the people either side of me. I am sure you have never done these things, and that you sit cheerfully present, perhaps quietly practising a meditative breathing exercise when you’re on the train or bus or plane, smiling beatifically to all around you. However, I have done these things quite a lot, and I’m not alone. A recent incident on the Tube brought the whole issue into focus for me.

The train was inexplicably crowded, and I was standing behind someone struggling to drink a cup of coffee. The coffee in itself was a minor selfishness: only children and Americans used to eat in public, and now many people do. To be fair, the bloke with the coffee was clearly regretting bringing his double decaff latte into the Black Hole of Calcutta. He brought his cup to his lips with furtive, uncomfortable movements whenever the crowd shifted enough to let him raise his hand to his mouth.

Then a perfectly charming middle-aged woman turned around and accidently elbowed his coffee arm with surprising force. Miraculously he managed to spill most of it on himself. However, three drops fell on the dark overcoat of a man in front of him, like the drops of wine that fall in The Deer Hunter, drops that you knew presaged some grim future reckoning.

Our coffee drinker now faced a terrible moral drama. The man whose coat he had stained didn’t know there was coffee on him – but other people around him did. Should he alert his victim, or move away through the crowd? He took a surprise middle-course, a sort of Blairite third way, and dabbed ineffectually at the victims’s coat with a paper napkin – but very gently, so as not to alert him to the problem. The man turned around. He was short, belligerent, sensing he was being made fun of in some way, and spoiling for a fight, and demanded to know:

“What’s going on?”

The guy with the coffee, who was young, demure, student-like, explained that he’d spilt his drink, and couldn’t have been more apologetic. His victim was apoplectic.

“You! You did this! My coat! You did this! It’s your fault!”

More than anything else he seemed desperate to blame and to clearly establish guilt, to make absolutely clear that he was entirely without fault. His assailant agreed, which disarmed him somewhat, so he changed his line of argument.

“What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do? You should pay to dry clean it! You should pay!”

Several onlookers protested that it was only a few drops of coffee, that it would come off with soap and water, and that there was no need for dry-cleaning. Annoyed at being talked out of his compensation he glared and before turning around to dismiss the whole episode said once again to his assailant:

“It’s your fault!”

The crush of people moved and I ended up scoring a seat.

After a few moments I looked up and realised I was opposite the man with the coffee-stained coat. He had taken out a small portable video player and was watching some television with a grumpy expression. Now, I have an Archos portable video player myself, as do many other fine and upstanding civic types, but there was something just right about watching him peer at his little video screen and trying to keep the hostile, coffee-throwing hordes at bay.

I know cities are crowded and the Tube is a pain and we all want to squeeze as much digital diversion as we can out of the day. Yet we’ve started a sort of digital arms race: you pull out a mobile phone, I pull out an iPod Touch, you strap a sixty-inch flat panel TV screen to your face. I suspect we’d all have a much nicer time if we left the toys at home and brought along an improving book.

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Michael Parsons, now editor of CNET.co.uk, spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at michael.parsons@cnet.com

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