Wrong. In fact, the opposite is the case. What you see as being "disconnected" from the action because of the Twittering and Texting is quite the opposite - you're just not a participant, so you don't see it.

I spend a LOT of time studying how society and technology intersect and how each generation now experiences multiple techno-social disconnects in addition to the normal "you just don't get it" of teen/adult communications.

In the case of the obsessive texting (3,000 to 4,000 messages a MONTH is quite typical for a 15 year old female), what is happening is there is an extension of the social circle facilitated by short messages that creates what we call an "ambient awareness" of the current activities, emotions and opinions of a social group. What is most interesting about this is that the distinction you and I make between "here and present" and "virtual and not present" is not the same for this group.

One of my favorite examples of this phenomena is a recent case I studied in which we asked a group of teens about a recent movie. We asked them what they thought of the film, and they gave us a range of answers. We then asked where they saw the film, and this is where I realized I was in new territory.

Of the group of 12 teens, all of whom had been telling us what they thought of the film, only 9 had actually been in the theater - 3 of them were unable to go, but they got a near real-time update of the film from the folks who were in the theater.

But that's not the interesting part - the interesting part is when we asked each of them "Who went to the film with you?" and NONE of the girls who were not present were excluded from the names they gave us! To them, their 3 friends who were not physically there were still a part of the group! This is a fairly major change in societal organization and communications - the idea that your "clan" and communications circle is beyond the limits of physical presence and untethered to a location, yet present enough to qualify as concurrently experiencing an event.

In many ways, this is a bigger change in society than the motor vehicle or electricity, because it is changing how we think about presence and place - and it is changing how we communicate. We're getting more visual and less verbal, we're becoming more parallel - we're bad at multi-tasking now, but some people are very, very good at it.

So, to pull this back to the OP topic - the women may not have thought to do anything but call 9-1-1 but you don't know that they had an alternative. In their situation, panic could have set in, the doors may have been forced shut, they may not have thought they were were in immediate danger - we can't - and will never - know.