John Linton
I have no idea of Ms Vescellaro's credentials and disagree with much of what she says in this:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574431151489408372.html?mod=loomia&loomia_si=t0:a16:g2:r4:c0.0621971:b28257166
but, as usual I get impressed with quoted 'statistics' even when, as in this case it would have been impossible to actually collect them. I would also have to discount her major premise:
"But email was better suited to the way we used to use the
Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we
are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile
phone."
Doubtless some, perhaps a great many, people used to "log on and off" to their email - no-one in business ever did that who had a halfway communications dependent job and last time I looked email was a business communications method that has been taken up by some types of 'social' users - but not very many I wouldn't have thought. Personally my email is never logged off and, apart from when I am asleep or socially engaged any email I wish to reply to averages less than ten minutes with 80% of received email replied to within less than 5 minutes. I am not an exception (in business) where the principal people with whom I communicate reply to my emails within similar time frames except for the more junior employees of Exetel's major suppliers who regard Exetel as not very important.
So I assume she is really referring to the mobile phone/SMS 'generation' to whom nothing is too trivial to communicate in their vacuous and boring lives - a touch harsh but in dealing with sweeping generalisations you get a lot of license. Perhaps the thrust of the article is correct in that the constant development of "instant" messaging shows no sign of declining and today's mobile telephone and presumably mobile computer user becomes addicted to a stream of mundanity that properly reflects the pointlessness of their lives. However her research is poorly based and even her generalisations are historically way out.
Email didn't replace the letter as she claims - the telephone did - which has all of the speed of the new technologies she is lauding together with the additional benefit of 'instant' clarification of misunderstandings. For the record the posted letter was only replaced by the telephone because of the illiteracy of the general user of written communications - not because it "took days" for the letter to reach its destination it didn't. A kinder person than me would probably say the multiple daily postal deliveries were rendered pointless once the telephone allowed 'instant' replies to the sender of any letter therefore not needing a 'same day' service for replies. While I never personally knew the pre-WW2 frequency of early morning post, mid morning post, afternoon post and evening post delivery schedules that extended from the late Victorian era to 1940 (even in rural England). I was born and had part of a childhood in a twice daily postal delivery system which seemed more than sufficient but in any event had indeed begun to be replaced by the 'just thought I'd call to have a chat' telephone service.
Sure - you can't send photographs over the telephone but then a better educated world still retained the vestiges of enough English language skills to allow vivid descriptions of events and people that needed describing without the aid of pictures. I am not belittling the current IM services which drive the growth of mobile telephony expenditure that benefits at least those companies who provide such services and contribute to passing on information to more locations of people at any time than ever before in the history of humanity - just correcting the writers mis-assumptions which lead to her incorrect conclusions. There may even be some sort of social or personal benefit in the new IM technologies and it may be come to be seen that they in fact do have a beneficial place in human societies....but I don't think that is by any means certain.
IM wouldn't be the first 'universally used' "product" that has more negative effects on individuals and societies than was initially thought when the products were 'welcomed' in to general use (think - tobacco, alcohol, amphetamines and opiates just to quote the most obvious). Personally, I think that IM as an adjunct to RPG and chat sites has increased the capacity of technology to destroy the current generation of Australian children more completely than the Black Death destroyed Western Europe in the mid 14th century - but with less chance of recovery.