The queen misses eye contact, blames cell phones

The queen wants to laugh with you. CBS News screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

It's hard out there for a royal.

You walk among your subjects every day, hoping for some adulation, or at least a little respect, and all you get is a morass of plastic with apples on them and words like "Samsung."

The strange phenomenon of constant instant photography and selfies seems to have got to the queen of England.

Queen Elizabeth II is said to be troubled by the idea that no one will look her in the eye anymore. It's nothing personal, of course. It's just that the world no longer revolves around her.

It revolves around the ability of her citizens and visitors to snap a picture of her and slap it onto Facebook or Twitter in the speed of a shutter. It makes them seem important. The phenomenon is called -- well, since I just named it -- Likehacking.

As the Telegraph reports, the revelations came from the US ambassador to Britain, Matthew Barzun. He tattled to Tatler magazine that Her Majesty feels it's "strange" to see all those cell phones pointed at her.

"She was essentially saying: 'I miss eye contact,'" said Barzun, a former CNET executive.

None of us gets much eye contact these days. The trouble is, I'm not sure how many people miss it.

It may well be that cell phones are the first step in sliding us away from those old human habits and toward a world where we'll all be connectors for technology's all-encompassing sweep.

Then, we'll look at old rom-coms and say to ourselves: "That staring thing used to work? Hah. I must tell my robot sex doll."

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