Main Entry: Overconnectedness
Part of Speech: N
Definition: An obsession with staying in constant touch with people and/or events via communications technology
Example: Overconnectedness is a disease of the Internet age.
I was sitting down to dinner with my parents the other day when my dad and I started discussing the differences in our generations and how we consume information. I was trying to make the point that my generation (”Gen Y“) has grown up on computers and that our communication skills and proclivity for instantaneous response have been ingrained in us from the time we were six or seven. Even more so, for those children that are now growing up around smartphones and unregulated access to the internet, they will continue to communicate in a fundamentally different manner than those 60-year-olds currently trying to understand the concept of a wall post or a tweet.
Earlier this month, Time reported on a new service that enables people to send e-mails to a company that prints the correspondence and delivers it, via U.S. Postal Service, to their family and friends who don’t use the Internet. After initially thinking this would be great for my grandmother, I wondered what makes my life so busy that I couldn’t pick up a pen and write a handwritten note (probably in the same time it takes to write the darn e-mail)? For as accomplished and connected as many Gen Y-ers seem to feel these days, has advancing technology actually made my generation even lazier?
My dad, however, believes that while our world is no-doubt changing, human nature will inevitably kick in as young adults mature, their tastes change and they settle down. The fast pace of life, the violence and explicit content of TV and film, and the desire to stay connected in so many different arenas will become less appealing as we age. While I certainly hope we slow down, I don’t think we will. My parents’ generation has grown up largely without such advanced technology being readily at their disposal, whereas when I am their age, it will seem commonplace—it already does, actually.
Pew Internet reported in 2008 that only 41 percent of US adults over the age of 65 are online. Will the said predictability of human nature prevail and the 41 percentage of Internet users be the same when Gen Y-ers reach their 60s? Or is my generation charging down a fundamentally different path, where overconnectedness will kill our ability to slow down and enjoy the simpler things, and we’ll be clutching our iPhones to tweet our last tweet from our graves?
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Interesting post. Your parents haven’t given up the new-fangled technology from their youth – the television – in their older, slower age, have they? And our grandparents haven’t given up the telephone. We may not be facebooking or twittering per se at 60, but we’ll be definitely be online almost all the time — just like we are now — with the exception of those times when we exhibit extreme will power. I’m just glad I’m not part of the next generation, “Gen Z (?),” which will undoubtely have the internet installed directly into their cerebral cortices, and I bet it’ll seem completely normal to them too.
Very interesting read. I definitely think the age of the internet is causing the slow death of arts like language, writing and reading. It seems that there are fewer and fewer people these days that can produce any legible piece of prose, read a book let alone a news article that is more than 3 paragraphs, or can go more than 4 hours without being connected to the internet in some way.
When I first started in PR we used to laugh at our tech clients who seemed to speak a different language with all the acronyms they use, but it made sense for them to have acronyms because the names of their products and services were complicated and long. I find it hard to find a reason to shorten conversations with my friends and family to simple acronyms like LOL, LMAO, TTYL, BRB, YT, etc.
Bottom Line: is this decreasing our intelligence? Or is it just altering it?
Good question, Matt (and good post, Ali). While I don’t think these acronyms decrease intelligence, I do think the abbreviations tend to greatly reduce the richness of language, paring things down to simple concepts, quickly and easily digested while moving on to the next. It’s less effort.
Well, back to my rocking chair CRK CRK CRK
That’s funny about Sunnygram – I had that exact same idea a while back! That service will probably do quite well for a while – a lot of the older generation is still romantic about the concept of letter writing but dismissive of email as trite. Your generation, Ali, don’t see the difference. My generation (call it “W”, somewhere before “X”) is in the middle – old enough to understand our parents’ desire for a hard copy letter, young enough not to be too bothered with them ourselves, old enough to be struggling a bit with the point of tweeting (confession: I have a twitter account, posted a grand total of 1 tweet i think).
But to the point of your post, Sunnygram definitely looks like a service with inbuilt obsolescence. Neither my generation nor yours will see any point writing anything out longhand, putting in an envelope, sticking a stamp on it, and taking it to a mailbox. Because really, if you take away the nostalgia, what on earth is the point?
So, full disclosure, my friend’s husband founded Sunnygram. I agree with Hamish that they will probably do quite well for a while. However, built in obsolescence? Only if they don’t evolve the media between which they are “translating.” For example, maybe they could compile “best of” Tweets or Facebook photos and status updates and send them in an old-fashioned e-mail. That might appeal to my mom and her friends.
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