I cannot say enough about the need to get people's attention during a meeting, but there has got to be some happy medium. I absolutely love the productivity I get out of my Mac-infested world (iPhone, MacBook Pro, etc...). However, when we have a meeting, sure people might be listening just enough to capture any major todos being offloaded to them, but they are in a zombie-like state. They don't contribute (unless the conversation affects their workload for the negative) and they don't want to be there. So, they check their email, chat, pretend to be monitoring a crucial server infrastructure in fakey-made-up-land.

Hello people!!! A meeting is supposed to be between people (conscious people), not half-borg morphs with their hands stuck on their digital devices. Perhaps, there can be proper rules and etiquette enforced that resolve some of this scenario, but I have to agree with mattw. If it is a well-run, organized meeting involving several people, someone should be in charge of organizing the agenda and sticking to it, not straying off on tangents that can be referenced from a computer. Keep the larger meeting to the agenda - brief and to the point (hand out an outline with space where everyone can make notes).THEN, after you've had the structured meetings involving human eye contact and interaction, you can then meet the small number of others that actually care about your reference material and you can all bring your laptops. People are less likely to zone out on their laptops with meetings of 2-5 anyway.

Ideas and solutions just don't get produced when people are that distracted.