"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.
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 ...
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