Does technology have to be rude?

I've been seeing more and more mention of technological overload lately, where technology is leading us and how it is changing our accustomed culture. Just finished a long article about the ethics and consequences of public cell phone use. One of the most interesting conclusions it tries to draw is that cell phone use disconnects us from the public sphere in favor of connecting us more tightly to our own personal sphere i.e. we can surround ourselves with the "virtual presences" of people we know much more easily, "protecting" us from interactions with people we don't know, those that are very important in making up our social awareness as citizens of the public.
Some time before the election, one of the big topics of conversation, at least on the blogs I read regularly, was whether the rise of blogs would just allow us to be exposed to only what we want to hear, and nothing more. I'm not sure yet about this conclusion, but it rings a bell with this cell phone use conclusion. But humans are inherently tribal, and we gravitate to the familiar and comfortable, so why shouldn't this be the case when technology liberates communication from needing a strict spatial presence?
Maybe we just need to grow some tact. Maybe these are the days where excitement with the New reigns supreme, but society seems to regularly impose rules on things that don't benefit everybody. Stop lights, speeding tickets, smoking laws:
excerpt

One possible solution would be to treat cell phone use the way we now treat tobacco use. Public spaces in America were once littered with spittoons and the residue of the chewing tobacco that filled them, despite the disgust the practice fostered. Social norms eventually rendered public spitting déclassé. Similarly, it was not so long ago that cigarette smoking was something people did everywhere—in movie theaters, restaurants, trains, and airplanes. Non-smokers often had a hard time finding refuge from the clouds of nicotine. Today, we ban smoking in all but designated areas. Currently, cell phone users enjoy the same privileges smokers once enjoyed, but there is no reason we cannot reverse the trend. Yale University bans cell phones in some of its libraries, and Amtrak’s introduction of “quiet cars” on some of its routes has been eagerly embraced by commuters. Perhaps one day we will exchange quiet cars for wireless cars, and the majority of public space will revert to the quietly disconnected. In doing so, we might partially reclaim something higher even than healthy lungs: civility.