If you could have got it all into a shot, I think that would have made a terrific image depicting the social degradation and deterioration of our culture. The message would have been pretty clear.
The enormous expansion and lowered cost of people interacting with each other is, ipso facto, emblematic of a degraded society and deteriorated culture? Pickle, meet close-sphincter'd mind. Paralleling our unprecedented access to others, is the explosion in information that we can -- and do -- record and share. The
"terrific image" that you imagine, would be -- imho, obviously -- marvelous if it showed the several and varied ways of absorption and attention being paid to others by this random spatial nexus of strangers. Artistically, we may be moving from a shared language of body gesture to one based much more on smaller forms, particularly the face and hand. (TV, technically coarse as it is, has lead the way.) Socially, I think we are living through an overlay of _additional_ social opportunities, not a displacement. Just the other day my footman brought me the first new calling card I've had the pleasure to finger in over a decade -- a rare occurrence I immediately tweeted!
Now that I think on it, perhaps one way to raise the level of civility on these wildly-accessible Internet forums -- and here I beg your forgiveness for applying the lessons you would draw from your imagined terrific image to our LuLa local -- would be to require a live feed of each typist, and show them in a moving banner across the top of the forum pages. I'm not sure how keen one would be to type
"Get the pickle out of your ass" knowing that one's recipient and one's pub-mates were observing.