IT was a vision of family togetherness out of a Norman Rockwell painting, if Rockwell had worked in the era of WiFi. After a taco dinner one Wednesday in March, Dianne Vavra and her family retreated to the living room of their Cape Cod-style house in Huntington, N.Y., where they curled up on the spacious beige sofa amid hand-stitched quilts as an icy rain pelted the windows.

Ms. Vavra, a cosmetics industry executive in Manhattan, looked up from her iPad, where she was catching up on the latest spring looks at Refinery29.com, and noticed that her husband, Michael Combs, was transfixed, streaming the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament on his laptop. Their son, Tom, 8, was absorbed by the Wii game Mario Kart on the widescreen television. Their daughter, Eve, 10, was fiddling with a game app called the Love Calculator on an iPod Touch. “The family was in the same room, but not together,” Ms. Vavra recalled.

One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities, basically. While it may look like some domestic version of “The Matrix” — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon.

Call it what you will, it is a wholly different form of quality time.

The culture of home-based iDistraction has already become a pop-culture trope, and no wonder: Never has there been so much to consume, on so many devices. On a recent episode of ABC’s “Modern Family,” the character Claire Dunphy explodes when she tries to serve the family breakfast, only to be ignored by a husband adjusting his fantasy football roster on his iPad, a son playing video games on his Nintendo DS and two daughters e-mailing each other from across the table. “O.K., now that’s it, everybody, gadgets down, now!” she declares. “You’re all so involved in your little gizmos, nobody is even talking. Families are supposed to talk!”