Here’s a read for you; this article presents some data that sort of shocked me. Thanks to Douglas M. for the recommendation!
Today we worry about the social effects of the Internet. A century ago, it was the telephone that threatened to reinvent society.
In 2009, the United States crossed a digital Rubicon: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data. The shift was heralded in tech circles with prophetic fury: “The phone call is dead,” pronounced a blogger at the Web site TechCrunch. Writing in Wired, journalist Clive Thompson observed, “This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social network messaging.” And the online news network True/Slant declared a paradox: “We’re well on our way to becoming an incredibly disconnected connected society.”
On the other hand, tweets in 2003 had an average length of 0 characters, and other the last nine years, they have increased nearly one infinity percent (hey you try to divide by zero), to an average length of 78 characters (in my little corpus of 598 tweets I happen to have handy, all of which include the word “hisself”). Are phone calls so sacred that to replace them with something else (SMS/Twitter/Facebook) means society is becoming “incredibly disconnected connected”? This sounds like a Ma Bell representative forgot his Ambien this morning and just now heard about the internet.
Can I just say: Yonkers 1:16-1:18
(Oh man, that’s awesome, I can reference pop music like it’s scripture.)
And please, neither the telephone nor the internet have reinvented society. Unless you define society by your grandma’s decrying “in my day” when she sees your SMS bill.