90's high schooler here. Oh yeah, those basic social skills at lunchrooms at school.
Sitting in noisy lunchroom isn't fun if you have autism. Walkman/disc man was my fav (you know, that thing I used while on the bus, so no I didn't talk much there to others either). Too bad we didn't have noise-cancelling headset back then. Back to lunchroom. Went for a drink while leaving your school bag? Your scientific calculator got reset by one of the bullies. Good luck getting it ready again for math/physics/chemistry/biology class test. But I usually just lunched elsewhere anyway, since I wasn't allowed in the cool kids group, and I ended up finding solace in that. So where did I end up? In the multimedia library! 20 or so PCs which you could use for, eh... 'homework.' At one point I found out you could just edit your student number in HTML, so once I figured the student number of a bully I signed him up to study in one the silence rooms for a week. When he found out I did that, he did the same to me, but -unlike him- I was cool with that. As for that library: other, more smarter kids than me, went to sit separate to study during break. And during lunch break there were people bored, shooting with elastics, yelling, running, bullying. Book reading at school? Didn't happen much during lunch breaks. Some studying, sure. That it was so awesome before the smartphone time, is a nostalgia myth.
FTA:
> The faculty donated board games to help ease kids into the phone-free era. Student volunteers oversaw a table stacked with games: checkers, chess, Yahtzee, Scrabble, Clue, Life and Trivial Pursuit. For many of the kids, it was their first time playing the games, and they said they were enjoying it.
Oh, yeah. I played MtG back in those days but was called a 'nerd' for that, and surprisingly nobody in my class (gymnasium; highest education level on high school) would also play it. At times, I kind of enjoyed something like Black Lady and Rikken, but Poker just bored me, and I didn't like the play for money (it was officially forbidden, but you know how that goes).
> Ko said other analog activities have also made a comeback, including cards, hangman, tic-tac-toe and Polaroid cameras. “There are just a lot of memories that we make throughout high school that we want to capture,” she said. “I actually have a lot of Polaroids on my wall.”
Funny how there's still a need to make photo's. That is one thing I hate about smartphones. That excessive need to photograph everything these days.
Now, about the subject. I don't think it has to be 'all' or 'nothing'. It wasn't 'nothing' back in the days (as I already wrote above, we just consolidated a lot of devices), it wasn't perfect back in the days either.