2010: The year
technology replaced
talking



 
By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY

 
 
Americans are connecting in droves: 93% now use
cellphones or wireless devices, and one-third of those
are "smartphones" that allow users to browse the Web
and check e-mail.

By Orlin Wagner, AP

 
 
 
 
When Gretchen Baxter gets home from work as a
New York City book editor, she checks her
BlackBerry at the door.

"I think we are attached to these devices in a way
that is not always positive," says Baxter, who'd
rather focus at home on her husband and 12-year-
old daughter. "It's there and it beckons. That's
human nature (but) ... we kind of get crazy
sometimes and we don't know where it should stop."

Americans are connected at unprecedented levels —
93% now use cellphones or wireless devices; one-
third of those are "smartphones" that allow users to
browse the Web and check e-mail, among other
things. The benefits are obvious: checking
messages on the road, staying in touch with friends
and family, efficiently using time once spent waiting
around.

The downside: Often, we're effectively disconnecting
from those in the same room.
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    By Sam Ward, USA TODAY
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That's why, despite all the technology that makes
communicating easier than ever, 2010 was the Year
We Stopped Talking to One Another. From texting at
dinner to posting on Facebook from work or
checking e-mail while on a date, the connectivity
revolution is creating a lot of divided attention, not
to mention social angst. Many analysts say it's time
to step back and reassess.

"What we're going to see in the future is new
opportunities for people to be plugged in and
connected like never before," says Scott Campbell,
assistant professor of communication studies at the
University of Michigan, who studies the social
implications of using mobile devices. "It can be a
good thing. But I also see new ways the traditional
social fabric is getting somewhat torn apart."

Our days are filled with beeps and pings — many of
which pull us away from tasks at hand or face-to-
face conversations. We may feel that the distractions
are too much, but we can't seem to stop posting,
texting or surfing.

"We're going through a period of adjustment and
rebalancing," says Richard Harper, principal
researcher in socio-digital systems at Microsoft
Research in Cambridge, England, and author of the
new book Texture: Human Expression in the Age of
Communications Overload.

Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on
Technology and Self in Cambridge, Mass., wants to
remind people that technology can be turned off.

"Our human purposes are to really have connections
with people," she says. "We have to reclaim it. It's
not going to happen naturally."

Her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More
From Technology and Less From Each Other,
suggests that the time is right for reassessment.
"You have to have experiences with it before you
can ask these questions. You can't ask in the first
five years. You have to see how it plays out," Turkle
says.

She's worried about what she sees today.

"We've come to confuse continual connectivity with
making real connections," Turkle says. "We're
'always on' to everyone. When you actually look
more closely, in some ways we've lost the time for
the conversations that count."

Connected to your social circle
 
Sociologist Claude Fischer of the University of
California-Berkeley is familiar with dire predictions
associated with new technology: He outlined them
in his 1992 book America Calling: A Social History
of the Telephone to 1940.

"If you go back 100 years, people were writing
things about the telephone not unlike people are
writing about these technologies. There was a whole
literature of alarm — how it's turning everything
upside down," he says.

In a new book, Still Connected: Family and Friends
in America Since 1970, he says the total contact time
with friends and family has not changed much in 40
years; there has been a slight decline in face-to-face
contact but a substantial increase in other ways of
communicating, such as phone and e-mail.

The "major" change is "the idea that you are
available to everybody in your social circle at every
minute and they are available to you," he says. "What
its consequences and implications are, we don't
know."

Social psychologist Robert Kraut of Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh is among those studying
our relationship with technology. "At any moment,
you're dividing your attention between the person in
front of you and the person you're giving snippets
of your attention to. We don't know the net
consequence of reducing the quality of the
relationship a little bit with the person you're with
while improving or maintaining it with the person
you're electronically tied to."

Harper says, "Some researchers do worry that
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connections to other people elsewhere are
weakening the connections to people you're with."

Adds James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile
Communication Studies at Rutgers University in New
Brunswick, N.J., and editor of Mobile
Communication: Dimensions of Social Policy, out
Jan. 31: "There's no question that these mobile
gadgets are affecting our behavior. There is not a
uniform declaration that everyone agrees to as to
what this change means. Everybody sees merits and
demerits, but whether the effect is good or bad is
hotly contested."

Campbell says mobile phones provide opportunities
to coordinate social activities more easily.

"The more people use mobile phones, the more
likely they are to see friends and family because it
strengthens those relationships," he says. "It doesn't
take away from how much we see our friends, but it
can take away from the quality of the time we spend
with people when we're physically together and
using the technology with others."

The statistics paint a clear picture of dramatic
increases in mobile devices. According to a semi-
annual wireless survey released in October by the
industry trade group CTIA-The Wireless
Association, 93% of Americans now use a wireless
device or cellphone — and not just for voice calls.

From June 2009 to June 2010, subscribers sent 1.8
trillion text messages (up 33% from the previous
year) and 56.3 billion multimedia messages (up
187% from the year before). In its latest monthly
report, the Nielsen Co. found that almost 30% of
mobile subscribers in the USA have a smartphone
such as a BlackBerry or iPhone.

"Mobile telephony is becoming ubiquitous, with
access to mobile networks now available to over
90% of the global population," says the International
Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency.

Campbell says Americans feel these changes so
profoundly because we're just now "truly
experiencing this kind of critical mass."

"It's not just about the adoption level being high,
but this technology has really worked its way into
our everyday lives," he says.

Less than full attention

As with much in technology, some differences may
 
be generational.

Teens are just fine with being together and texting
others at the same time, Campbell says.

"There's no social disruption," he says. "But across
generational lines, there is major disruption." Adults
"are offended and don't understand why, when the
family is trying to spend time together, teens have to
be socially someplace else."

It's not just happening with parents and teens.

When someone starts texting at a party or a
business meeting, it may be taken as in insult by
those physically present. When a parent pulls out
the BlackBerry to e-mail the office while at home with
the kids, the unfortunate message they send to the
children may be that "there is someone I'd rather be
interacting with than you."

There are upsides: The increased use of mobile
devices does help keep relationships alive, says
Kraut, who says cellphones allow people to convert
otherwise wasted time (such as that spent walking
somewhere) to contact with others.

"It's multitasking in a way that's good," he says.
"They need to get someplace, but can have a
pleasurable conversation when they're doing it."

At the same time, Turkle says, we can no longer
assume we have someone's full attention when we're
physically with them. "We're saying to each other in
one way or another that we can always put each
other on pause."

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Sharing space

Like Baxter, more tech lovers are setting limits.

No one had to tell Susan Maushart of Mattituck, N.
Y., how consumed by technology her family was.
They unplugged for six months, and she recounts
the experience in The Winter of Our Disconnect:
How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother
Who Slept With Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their
Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale, out Jan. 20.

"We're connected to everything but one another and
it's completely normal for this time and place," she
says.

Maushart was spurred to act when she looked
around the living room and "all I could see were the
backs of people's heads, because they were
interacting with their screens."

At the time, her kids were 14, 15 and 18.

"It was the prime of their teenage years — that last
moment when we were going to all be together
under that one roof," Maushart says. "I felt sick at
the pit of my stomach that this was going to all
dwindle away."

She says it was liberating to be free of her devices,
even though she loves technology.

Others have these mixed feelings, as well.

"There's no question cellphones somehow make you
reachable 24/7, and I don't like it," says Prudence
Bushnell Boyer of Silver Spring, Md., a lawyer and
mother of two daughters, ages 12 and 7.

"Now, they expect you to answer the phone all the
time," she says. "I think it's disruptive and
disconcerting. But my 12-year-old thinks it's
wonderful to be connected all the time."

Bushnell Boyer says times have changed.

"It used to be if someone was talking to themselves,
they were usually not in their right state of mind.
Nowadays, you realize they have an earpiece and are
talking to someone and not really where they are.
They're not connected to the time or place they're
in," she says.

Despite her cellphone, BlackBerry, Kindle and the
iPad she shares with colleagues at work, Gretchen
Baxter says adults are having a more difficult
 
adjustment to the world consumed by technology.
She doesn't thinks kids will.

"They're so used to it and like everything, they'll get
blasé about it," she says.

But, Baxter says she has her concerns: "I worry for
the kids that they won't know what it's like to share a
story, to look people in the eyes — to know that
sharing a space with someone is all about
connecting and not with the technological device."

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