We, PEOPLE, are social beings–we require intimacy, touch, friendship and bonding but I feel technology has pushed us too far into the wrong kind of social connection. We are always “plugged in”. (When is the last time your cell phone was off for 24hrs straight? When have you forgotten your phone and not turned back home to go get it?)

More than ever, people are sending texts, e-mails, tweets (or whatever) to others as means of communication rather than actually calling them or visiting in person. It is even acceptable to not visit someone on a holiday as long as you send them a pretty, well-written e-card.

Also, this constant connection is expected. I’ll share a few personal examples…
1: It’s my friend’s birthday, we hang out, I give her a gift, we celebrate, but she complains how I didn’t text her Happy Birthday earlier that morning.
Example 2: It’s New Year’s Eve, the countdown has just reached zero so it is now a new year…my friend is texting everyone to say Happy New Year faster than I could even take a sip of cider. She gets upset when a person or two she texted didn’t write back, not understanding that they may we with family, asleep, or simply satisfied with reading the messege and don’t feel the need to respond.
Example 3: While having a conversation with my friend (in person) she is texting nonstop, having conversations with multiple other people. This is BEYOND rude, but seems to now be socailly acceptable.
Example 4: While driving my friend hears a beep from her phone and “has to” respond to the text or at leat pick up the phone and look to see what the sender had to say simply because they wrote to her.
Example 5: I get made fun of for not checking my MySpace account often enough and people actually get offended that I don’t log-in to check if they’ve sent my anything.

The list can go on and on, but my point is simply this: We are too connected by gadgets and technology and we’re slowly forgetting what it is to be human. We smile through a keyboard and no longer our mouthes. We completely change languange, not for the better with text/IM/e-mail jargon such as LOL, ROLF, L8R, SK8R, OMFG, and plenty more I have yet to learn. Do the benefits of such connection outweigh what is happening to our culture–our vulnerable youth?

I leave you with a very appropriate yet saddening quote by Albert Einstein: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

I couldn’t agree more, Albert, I couldn’t agree more.

I wasn’t going for the in-depth, serious discussion in this article, sorry!

Mind you, this could have been an interesting discussion, even a little tongue-in-cheek, but no…

I think you are not an average twitter user

Abhimanyu
http://mwolk.com/blog

And, at risk to raise the ire of Dr Grohol, does it reinforce addiction-type behavior of those using the technology of the internet? Or, is this post tongue in cheek and I missed that sentiment?

1. To me, it reinforces the notion that there’s nothing of worth to add to the public conversation. Because whatever message you want to tweet, someone else has already tweeted (!?) it. Twenty-five other people ate Cheerios for breakfast too, fifty other people already mentioned that news story you thought was breaking, & hundreds have already made that clever observation about everyone wants masks for swine flu but no one will wear a condom to protect themselves from AIDS. Yeah, everything’s been said and done. Bummer.

2. Twitter alone is a microcosm of the Internet in general. Like the Web at large, there’s information from both reliable and unreliable sources. And on Twitter, it’s remarkably easy to find both good & bad information. It won’t be long before school-aged kids begin citing tweets in their research papers. (Are the MLA & APA working on a citation style yet?)

3. My third gripe is all about information overload. I promised myself that I’d reduce my time spent on the Internet so that I could have more time to relax, exercise, de-stress, & goof off with other unstructured activities. There’s something about Twitter that’s compelling (probably the real-time nature of it all) & sticky. I made the mistake of typing in “Swine Flu” yesterday to see if I could pick up on the latest news story, & I got way more information than I bargained for. Instead of spending five minutes reading a single news story, I spent about two hours opening multiple tabs to multiple news stories thanks to multiple tweets that all sounded worthy of investigating. I was stuck in an information trap…on a nice 70 degree day when I could have been goofing around outside. Ugh.

http://www.twitterbacklash.com