Theaters, of course, spend a lot of time warning audience members to shut off their cellphones, sometimes to no avail. But onstage, mobile communication has become so integral to contemporary theater that a Tony-winning sound designer, Robert Kaplowitz, collaborated with a programmer, Jay Konopka, to design an app that makes iPhones ring or beep, or both, on cue. Next: figuring out how to make phones light up on cue, so that they cast a lifelike glow on actors.

Playwrights have been exploring the perils of the Internet for years: “The Dying Gaul,” which ran Off Broadway in 1998, featured the use of a chat room for deception, as did “Closer,” which ran on Broadway in 1999.

And even before the advent of digital communication, theater makers wanted to incorporate the latest conversational technology into their work. Think of “Bells Are Ringing,” a popular 1956 musical about a woman who works at a telephone answering service, or “Bye Bye Birdie,” the Tony-winning best musical of 1961, which features a much-loved show tune, “The Telephone Hour,” in which land lines are vehicles for teenage gossip.

Many of today’s playwrights are raising explicit questions about new forms of communication. “The Nether,” a play by Jennifer Haley that has been produced over the last two years in Los Angeles, London and New York, depicts a world in which men are prosecuted for sex crimes committed by their online avatars. “Privacy,” a play by James Graham that ran in London last year, details the threats posed by government surveillance.

Some shows, acknowledging that theatergoers cannot let go of their own phones, are seeking to employ them in storytelling. At “Elements of Oz,” presented by the Builders Association at Montclair State University in New Jersey this fall, theatergoers downloaded an app that supplemented the onstage production. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Miranda July had audience members use pictures on their phones (then projected on a screen) for her performance piece “New Society.” And this summer’s Broadway run by Penn & Teller used the cellphones of audience members for an opening trick.

But the most striking new development is the normalization of onstage digital communication: the number of shows in which mobile devices and social media are not the subject of comment or criticism, but simply a contemporary reality.

“The phone is totally boring its way into the consciousness of playwrights, because we live with them stapled to our faces, and major emotional and life-altering information is being transmitted via these devices,” said Bray Poor, a sound designer who worked on Ms. Baker’s “John.”