> I was struck by this article (within the last decade) as mobile phones and texting have been ubiquitous since the mid 90s (early 00s in the US). Funny that popular literature took a while to catch up.

I've mused about this a bit myself, it's and interesting topic. I've never reached a conclusion, but some of the factors I consider to be important:

* The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. (william gibson) There are many people my age (40) who didn't really have cell phones until the last 10-15 years. It's like cord-cutting: I haven't had cable in 20 years, neither have many of my tech friends, but a lot of folks seem to have only caught on en mass in the last few years. Similarly cell phone usage being ubiquitous in my techy peer group may not represent everyone, true ubiquity may be much newer.

* Related to the above, there's the tech phase in period. Once cell phones became ubiquitous, it's not like it instantly changed the habits and modes of thinking of those folks immediately. Between the limited number of talk minutes back in the old days, and the true ubiquity of landlines, cell phones were seen as an accessory, a secondary communication method. This still remains true institionally: you'll find lots of forms that ask about landline vs cell, or assume landline is the primary phone number, etc.

This also includes the notion of: we had to figure out how to use this tech. I don't mean it in the way of "how do i press the right buttons" but rather "what's the socially correct way to use this thing?" Is it OK to take a call in public? What's the expected response window for a txt? How does that prioritize with calls? What is polite on txt (which used to have a 140char limit per message that cost $.05 to send), and so on.

* There's some form of inertia involved. The telephone changed details, but not the fundamental idea that a person's reachability was tied to location. I mean, a telephone number went to a phone in a specific room (not strictly true, but close enough). Until the cell phone, this had been true forever, so millenia of story structure and concepts are built around it. Everyone was (and honestly still is) used to the idea and had built a lot of understanding around it. That understanding takes a little while to change, and if it's the only thing you've ever known, it may take a long while. Conversely, writers who grew up with mobile as the primary communication method and understand it as a core idea are only just now getting to the point where they are able to produce good stuff - there's still the learning/experience curve for writing.

I think that last point could be rewritten pithily as: write what you know.

* Finally, since story structure that has existed forever is broken by cell phones - it's possible that writers just needed to observe the world a bit to see how the conflicts changed as a result. Sometimes it can be fixed by patches "oh we can't do a search here, they have cell phones"... becomes "oh the battery is dead, do a search!". Other times the structure is just broken and must be abandoned. New structures can probably be invented, but that's hard.

Anyway, I don't know if the answers are in the above, but it's a fun topic.