modern multimodalities

The other day I saw a student walking past me, listening to an ipod, while reading a book.
Impressed as I was by his multi-tasking I felt a bit sad that he couldn't appreciate the environment without cocooning himself in another worlds.
It comes back to the soundscape/soundwalk idea - how can we become aware of our surroundings (even if it is only a dingy campus path) if we are visually entranced by a book, and aurally by music?

Perhaps this partly explains our increasingly weak relationship with landscape....