The telephone was an imperfect approximation of communicating with others at a distance using voice. It was, and still is, enormously useful and a number of innovations have kept it advancing. Perhaps the last major innovation that was realized was mobile telephony. For good or bad we could reach out - and be reached - almost everywhere and a tool had impacted how we communicate.
Synchronous and asynchronous data communications became important and one company successfully recognized that adding lightweight text to a mobile phone along with a form of email that was relevant to how one segment of the population would be important. RIM made billions on the Blackberry, but it is important to realize it is only a rough tool that resonated a bit with our deeper needs.
A few years later the iPhone came along with a new type of interface and a good enough window into the Internet - for most people a much better model than the Blackberry. Of course there are some for whom the Blackberry tool is better than the iPhone (or Android) tool, but for the most part the iPhone model is richer.
And now we are seeing the beginnings of a voice driven data interfaces from Apple and Google .. There is something that seems fundamentally "right" about Siri even though it is very early in its development. In a few years we'll begin to learn some answers. I'm pretty sure the Google approach to finding information and human/machine communication is far from optimal.
All of these tools are windows into something much deeper - us and our desire to communicate. I would bet a lot that we are much closer to the beginning than the end of a period of great change. The Industrial Revolution took about one hundred and fifty years and we're only about fifty years into the current revolution.
From my vantage point I don't see the younger generation as being more adroit simply because they grew up in a new world. They were surrounded by different tools and defaulted to them making them their own, but these tools will change. The term digital native is popular, but I don't see the process of change as abrupt with people on one side or the other of a divide -- a rich continuum of tools has been emerging. Some will replace old modes of communications entirely and some will serve niche groups differently. And there are surprises when very old tools prove to be much more robust than imagined.
It is probably best to keep up with tools and see what serves your own needs better. Moving to them because they are "new and improved" is the wrong approach. This is going to be an increasingly interesting and wild ride. Just like the Industrial Revolution some companies will have brief moments in the Sun, most will vanish and a few will endure.
My intuition tells me we really haven't made dramatic changes in how we deal with time - the Industrial Revolution made an enormous impact on us that lingers even though it is antiquated and perhaps counterproductive. Perhaps in ten or twenty years communication tools will emerge that finally rip apart our Victorian perception of time.