The quiet lift rule was broken by bad jokes and calls to the lift company, and then to the emergency services when that didn't work, until they had us clambering down a ladder one at a time.

On all other lift occasions there should be silence, no communication beyond the briefest of acknowledgements of another's existence and a pointed "excuse me" to those who fail to make way when the doors open. The same rule applies on all forms of public transport. Turn off your phone, turn down your video, stop the gossip. Who wants to hear the banalities of other people's lives when we've plenty of our own.

Why everyone doesn't accept this is one of the great mysteries of modern life. Take the monstrous effort of an American in London, Jonathan Dunne, who last month decided to overturn clear, established train etiquette after no-one came to his work social function. 

He tried to get people to talk on the Tube by handing out hundreds of badges reading: "Tube chat?" Inevitably given the question mark, that led to tart badges in response saying "Don't even think about talking to me!" Dunne's good intentions misapprehended the problem to be solved. 

Observing a train full of people not talking to one another should not lead to a conclusion of deep social malaise.

Yes, social isolation is a problem, as it's long been. Each time someone dies alone and the body is discovered months later, we collectively fret about loneliness for a day or two, then carry on forgetting about others.

Over the last 20 years, the proportion of Australians living alone went up from 9 per cent to 12 per cent, and is projected to reach 16 per cent over the next two decades. As that figure increases, you would expect the number of isolated people to increase too. 

For many others, the more pressing problem is not a lack of connections but coping with too many of them. Facebook. Email. Twitter. Instagram. Snapchat. LinkedIn. Skype. Friend requests from schoolmates, colleagues, friends of friends, relatives, from those you met last night at dinner, the real estate agent. It's all too much.

Sixty-nine per cent of Australian internet users have a social media profile. Of those, half check it daily and a quarter check more than five times a day.

Facebook users check it on average 32 times a week. They spend 24 minutes on each visit – up from 17 last year. On average, users spend 12.5 hours a week on Facebook, and much of that time is talking with others, liking posts, recoiling with horror at support for Donald Trump posted by a relative. Yet only a third of respondents told the survey they spend too much time on social media; two-thirds were not worried about it.

The average number of Facebook friends in Australia is 272, far higher than the 150 suggested as the limit of a person's social circle by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford University. Most social media friends are destined to become mere acquaintances if you stop seeing them in person, even if social media helps slow this "natural rate of decay" of unseen friends.

Prolonging this means you end up with people designated as friends when they are friends no longer, and with whom it is both exhausting to keep up and ethically difficult to break. This is one problem with too much connection; it ruins the gentle drift apart of friends-for-a-time.