If so, you’re not alone. A recent study shows nearly 2 million Americans find it hard to leave home without these devices; worldwide, the total leaps to more than 1.5 billion.

Quite an acceptance curve for a product that is less than three decades old.

Tyler Barnett of Los Angeles, like all of us, has to find ways of balancing the use of his cell phone in interpersonal settings. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles)

Thunder up!

As for me, the newest media ritual occasioned by my own Droid obsession is staying abreast of the NBA playoffs, usually at times when I should be doing something else. But hey, it’s the Thunder, right?

Still, a dinner conversation with your significant other can be undermined pretty badly by a Droid-delivered NBA game.

If you’ve seen the AT&T “romantic dinner” commercial, you know what I’m talking about. Here’s a guy with this attractive woman and he is trying to balance his interest in her and the game on his iPhone. Operating in what he thinks is a stealth mode, he shoots glances to the phone on his lap while holding hands with his date.

A state of angst

While women viewers feel for the date, male viewers identify with the guy. He’s operating in what communication researchers call “a state of cognitive dissonance” or what most of us just call tension. He wants to score, but he also wants the score.

Despite what he thinks, he’s not doing a very good job. His date is onto him, and you get the feeling the question isn’t far off: “Okay, so what’s it gonna be? Me or the game?”

And the answer, of course, is …

The great debate

On a related note, I teach a university course in interpersonal communication, and this commercial always produces a spirited debate in class about a dating scene that is obviously a common one. And, in a larger vein, it goes to the question of how much we want to commit to the virtual world of the pixels as opposed to the attractive person sitting right in front of us.

This blog has addressed this real-world/virtual-world tension before. But before, it was usually the laptop that produced the tension. Now it’s the cell phone. After all, you can’t set up a laptop in front of you when you’re out on a date. Well, you can, but good luck getting a second one.

But who needs a laptop when we have the smart phone? Remember, though: just because that device is smart in what it can do, we still have to be smart in when it should make an appearance.

Texting while what?

I mean, there are times when that preoccupation can be downright dangerous to our health, right? The big one is texting while driving.  But how about texting while just plain walking?

A woman texts while walking across a crowded San Francisco street. While texting and driving has triggered more alarm bells and prompted laws in several states, experts say we should be aware of the dangers of texting while walking. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

Some of you may have seen the video of a woman falling into a mall fountain while texting as she strode along, oblivious to the watery hazard in front of her.

If you think that’s absurd, how about Bonnie Miller, from Benton Harbor, Michigan, who walked right off the pier  into Lake Michigan while texting a friend on her cell phone?

Gaits affected

According to a recent study in the journal, Gait & Posture, texting while talking has a definite disruptive effect on our gait, setting us  up for similarly embarrassing, if not dangerous, moments like these. An article in Men’s Health News discusses it.

In that study, a group of 20-somethings was randomly selected to walk while texting or talking on a cell phone. Researchers discovered that these twin concurrent activities caused the subjects to stride toward a target much more slowly than normal, and that they veered off course by 61 percent. Many actually walked beyond the target without realizing it until it was too late.

Hence, Mrs. Miller, the woman who wound up needing rescue from Lake Michigan. Her 15-year-old son said she had time to utter, “Oh God!” and then he heard the splash.

A watery rescue

She was rescued by her husband, Greg, and she is now speaking out to anyone who will listen about the dangers of texting while trodding.

This crazy kind of activity is how vital we believe our cell phones to be. We will actually risk our lives to update a friend on what we’re doing right now. Like swimming in Lake Michigan.

Dare one say we’re drowning in our addiction?

Witness the dramatic story of Edith Bouvier and William Daniels, two French journalists trapped inside the besieged Syrian rebel district of Bab Amr for a harrowing week last February with two other colleagues.

French journalist Edith Bouvier smiles as firefighters carry her into an ambulance after the plane carrying her and French photographer, William Daniels, landed at the Villacoublay military airport outside Paris, Friday, March 2nd, 2012. Two French journalists who were smuggled out of Syria have arrived in France. Edith Bouvier, who was injured, and William Daniels were caught up in a Syrian government siege of a rebel-held neighborhood in the city of Homs.(AP Photo/Zacharie Scheurer)

Unwelcome place

An excerpt from the March 19 edition of Time Magazine depicts the problem especially for Edith. Her left leg had been broken in a rocket attack in a Syrian home where she and her colleagues sought momentary refuge from an ongoing firefight between the Syrian army and rebel forces protesting President Bashar al-Assad’s repressive regime.

“The four survivors (two other journalists were with them and managed to escape quicker) were ushered into a new hideout: a single room with one small window, surrounded by taller houses and hidden from the street. For the next four days (they) were trapped there, listening to rockets and shells exploding from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and sometimes during the night. ‘Some days there were 300 bombs,’ Daniels says.”

The situation was dire. Two of their journalistic colleagues had been killed in the rocket attack that broke Edith’s femur. They all risked their lives to report on the conflict after being smuggled in, the government was upset about that, and military forces were hunting them down. If found, they didn’t expect to survive.

 Turning to YouTube

That’s when Williams and Bouvier turned to the social media for help.

Sites like YouTube and Facebook which we take for granted and use so frivolously at times, were looking like the only chance that these refugees in a war zone had to stay alive on the night of Feb. 22.

Williams and Bouvier, who was in pain and bleeding from her wound, needed to contact the outside world to seek help. But their options were greatly limited. While they could use cell phones, those phones could be used against them as Syrian military could pinpoint their location simply by triangulating the phone signals.

Avoiding detection

Journalist Vivienne Walt writes of Daniels’ decision to try another communication platform:

“With the media center destroyed, the closest Internet connection to the new hideout was a hazardous 10-minute walk through Bab Amr, which was ringed with government snipers. The journalists recorded a video and handed it to activists who braved the route and uploaded it to YouTube.

The video runs 6 minutes and 32 seconds, is done in French, Arabic, and English, and  features Bouvier speaking of her injuries and need for evacuation as she lies in  bed with the fighting going on outside the walls of the hideout.

Walt explains: “Seen throughout the world, the video showed Daniels (photographer Paul Conroy) and Bouvier appealing to French authorities and the International Committee for the Red Cross to evacuate them. Terrified that Assad’s forces would find them, they lied about heir location, saying in the video that they were far from the hospital … Their living conditions, however, were growing worse.”

Courage pays off

Ultimately, it would not be YouTube  that resulted in the evacuation of the small band of Williams and Bouvier; it was their own bravery and creativity in throwing in with a group of fighters from the Free Syrian Army who spirited them across the border into Lebanon on March 1.

But the notion that, given a little more time the social media exposure could have done the trick, is a fascinating one. It is only a short distance from an uploaded video on YouTube to the re-posting of it on Facebook and the tweeting of it on Twitter.

Individual stories count

The Kony 2012 video showed us all how fast this viral exposure can work in awaking the world to an issue that needs attention.

Even if that issue is just four European journalists trying to survive through another night as they try valiantly to get a story out about a rogue government trying to kill its own people.

Because, in the world of the social media, individual stories, plights, and faces can capture the world’s attention and produce action to help those in need.

This, of course, was the day 168 Sooners lost their lives and some 800 others were injured in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing.

I was living in Boston at the time, teaching at Boston College, but I was home visiting my parents in

Bagpiper Kevin M. Donnelly during the 17th annual Remembrance Ceremony at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum, in Oklahoma City, Thursday, April 19, 2012. Timothy McVeigh was convicted on federal murder charges for the 1995 deadly bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and was executed in 2001. The bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil before the 9/11 attacks.(AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, Pool)

the Oklahoma City area when Timothy McVeigh lit the fuse to the rented Ryder truck filled with homemade explosives.

Life-altering day

I spent the next two months covering the aftermath for an area daily newspaper whose town lost 26 souls in that bombing. It was a life-changing experience for all of us, and hardly a week has gone by since then that I haven’t thought about that tragic day.

I always try to relate my profession of newsgathering to the coverage of significant events, and recently I’ve been wondering how this day of April 19, 1995 might have been covered had it been April 19, 2012.

Viral effect

To begin with, people would have known about that event today even faster than they did in 1995, and more people would have been aware of it. In fact, it’s hard to believe anyone, anywhere would have been unaware of it by 10:30 a.m.

First word would have gone out in less than a minute over an iPhone or Droid cell phone.  Live pictures would have accompanied it, and probably a video as well on many phones.

And some of these uploads would have come from surviving victims themselves, some still buried in open spaces under piles of building rubble. The videos might have been incredible. Some of these calls and uploads might have helped find buried victims quicker.

Before long, the viral nature of digital communications would have done it’s job at the grassroots level rather than waiting for people to turn on their TV sets or car radios.

Facebook a factor

The same people phoning word out to friends would have also been uploading that word and those visual images to Facebook, then Instagram, then YouTube. By nightfall, there would be at least 20 million hits on these YouTube video uploads; maybe 80 million by the end of the next day.

By that next day, someone would have set up a dedicated FB page to the Oklahoma City bombing. It would be a place of information exchange, coming-together of those in grief,

Regina Bonny, a retired Midwest City, Okla., police officer from Moore, Okla., kneels at the chair of DEA agent Kenneth Glenn McCullough in the field of chairs at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

and of outpourings of support. If anyone needed help, this would be a good place to find it.

Other recent tragedies like the tsunamis of Indonesia and Japan, as well as the tragic loss of life in African countries, have shown the power that can come from such focused Facebook pages that serve as a meeting place for victims of tragedies.

What about accuracy?

As for the accuracy of the information itself, that may be another question. Whether in a digital age or not, the truth has a way of emerging slowly. Something like the blooming of a rose when exposed to the glare of sunlight.

Yes, there would have been more windows on this tragic world. There would have been more voices talking about what was happening. But solid facts about how many were killed, who they were, who survived, and who pulled the trigger igniting this misery – all these would all have to wait for journalists to do their jobs in the old-fashioned way: Asking questions of informed sources.

Life takes time

Having Facebook, Droids, or iPhones would not have enabled reporters to learn any faster who was buried under nine floors of concrete rubble. That technology wouldn’t have made finding the children in the second-floor daycare any easier. The search-and-rescue teams needed time to do their jobs, no matter how sophisticated the communication technology.

Of the many things I will always remember about April 1995, one is the way that journalists and search teams seemed to work in synch, albeit on different parts of the task at hand. The search teams would locate the bodies, the journalists would attempt to answer the myriad questions everyone had about this tragedy.

People doing their jobs

At the interface of these two groups – searchers and journalists – stood a handful of dedicated public affairs officers for the Oklahoma City Fire Department, Police Department, and FEMA. Their regular updates were helpful, and the coverage system they devised for journalists proved to be generally successful.

Nearly everyone seemed to be focused and doing their jobs in the days and weeks following that bombing, and the friends and families of the dead and survivors seemed grateful for that.

Both parts needed

Today’s interactive, digital media have shown what they can do in spreading the word to more people, faster. But the newer media forms, alone, are not enough when disaster strikes.

You have to plug in the dedication of trained responders and professional journalists, all focused on doing their jobs, for the recipe for resolution and healing to begin taking shape.

So much so that CBS rose to the top of the ratings on the nights it aired the hit series, “The Millionaire,” from 1955-1960. This was a show where a guy named Michael Anthony would travel the globe bestowing the golden sum on anyone his boss, John Beresford Tipton, deemed worthy of it.

If a network were to resurrect that series today, however, they would have to call it, “The Multimillionaire,” since that million would be worth just over $10 million in 2012 dollars.

Instagram is used on an iPhone Monday in New York. Facebook is spending $1 billion to buy the photo-sharing company Instagram in the social network's largest acquisition ever. Instagram lets people apply filters to photos they snap with their mobile devices and share them with friends and strangers. (AP Photo/Karly Domb Sadof)

Money and media

But you may be wondering, since this blog is about the digital media, what does money have to do with the price of pixels?

A lot, as it turns out. And for starters, $10 million is a vastly outdated sum of cash in the game of buying and selling social media sites.

Billion Dollar Baby

I’m talking about the $1 billion (yes, with a “b”) that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg just paid this week for another social network – Instagram – that wasn’t even around two years ago.

Instagram was launched way, way back in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger as a free photo-sharing application. To access it, all users have to do is shoot a digital picture, add on a filter, and then share it on several social networking sites include the Instagram site.  The photos appear in squares, harkening back to earlier-day Kodak Instamatic cameras.

Dangerous rival

According to an article today in the online site, TechCrunch, Instagram was starting to be too much of a rival for Facebook to ignore.

“At 27 million registered users on iOS alone, Instagram was increasingly positioning itself as a social network in its own right — not just a photo-sharing app,” writes Josh Costine and Kim-Mai Cutler.

“And it was clear that some users were doing more of the daily sharing actvities on Instagram rather than Facebook’s all-in-one mobile apps, which had to be cluttered with nearly every feature of the desktop site.”

Instagram has just launched an app for Android phones and was on track to pick up as many as 50 million new users. According to TechCrunch, it had already picked up one million in the first week of the Android launch.

Under the terms of the deal, Instagram will remain a stand-alone app under its own name, but there will be increased ties and crossover possibilities with Facebook for users of both networks.

Here’s the kicker

But it was the writers’ next observation that shows – let’s see, how shall I put this –  that smoke and mirrors only have value in the world of interactive digital media.

Mark Zuckerberg, who only a few years ago founded Facebook, has now acquired what he thinks is the next big thing: Instagram.

“Whatever you think of the price given the fact that Instagram had no revenues, the reality is it was going to be worth whatever Mark Zuckerberg felt like paying for it,” the TechCrunch writers say.

Keep in mind that we’re talking about a two-year-old company that – as Costine and Cutler say – has no revenues.  Like other social media sites, the value of Instagram lies in the fact it draws such a huge critical mass of eyeballs to its site.

Visions of sugar plums

As we’ve seen with other sites – most notably the Facebook phenomenon – that is a scenario that makes advertisers salivate as they contemplate the exposure for their client companies.

As for Zuckerberg himself, here is his take on what the acquisition means:

“For years, we’ve focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we’ll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.”

What lottery?

And if you’re still trying to wrap your mind around how much a billion dollars is, it is $344 million more than last month’s Mega Million jackpot of $656 million, which was the largest payout in lottery history.

And, once again, this billion dollars went for a company that made how much money?

A case in point would be the “Tebowmania” that accompanied the feats of (now former) Denver Bronco’s on-field achievements last fall.  So you get stories focusing on Tebow’s theology instead of his quarterbacking.

That’s a harmless example, but it’s easy to find others that are more significant and disturbing. A current example is the story of mass murderer Joseph Kony in Uganda and surrounding East African countries.

This is a 2006 photo of Joseph Kony. The number of soldiers in the violent Ugandan rebel group Lord's Resistance Army has dwindled to the low hundreds, and without external support could soon cease to exist, some source say. Yet Kony is still at-large, despite being indicted for war crimes.(AP Photo/Stuart Price, Pool, File)(AP Photo/Stuart Price, Pool, File)

A history of violence

Various reliable sources have shown that, over the years, Kony  and his officers have ordered the abduction of children to become child sex slaves and soldiers. An estimated 66,000 children became soldiers and two million people have been internally displaced since 1986.

 In 2005, Kony was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, but has evaded capture.His so-called Lord’s Resistance Army operates in Uganda, the Congo, Sudan, and other nearby areas in East Africa.

Invisible deaths

Like other international stories of genocide (Rwanda and the 800,000 deaths there in the early 1990s, for example) the atrocities of Joseph Kony have gone largely unnoticed by Americans until a group called Invisible Children decided to put his misdeeds on our radar screen.

The organization has done this in a number of ways over the past few years, but none has been as resoundingly effective as the Kony 2012 documentary that was hoisted onto Youtube a couple weeks ago and – to date – has been seen by about 85 million people.

Most of these viewers never even knew these atrocities had been occurring in Uganda for years.

Stated mission

The stated purpose of Kony 2012 is to bring worldwide attention to Kony – in fact to make him a household name. The goal here is obviously not to make us love him but to feel such revulsion for him that the efforts to find him and bring him to justice will succeed this year.

With the court of public opinion weighing so heavily on those who have the power to conduct that search and capture Kony, the idea is these power brokers will have to listen to the millions calling for Kony’s arrest.

Certainly the story of how the social media is being used to disseminate this message is fascinating. It provides a groundbreaking example of the pro-social value of social media outlets like Youtube and Facebook. It also shows that, while traditional media may have done stories in the past about Kony, a single Youtube video has been more effective in spreading the story than all of those network news reports and newspaper stories put together.

The rub

Therein lies the rub, however: the makers of the Kony 2012 video were so successful in reaching so many people in such a short period of time, that the focus of stories about the Kony video now is that phenomenon itself … and not Joesph Kony.

 Last week, after the Kony video hit 40 million viewers, each of the networks did stories that night, and the focus of each was on the viral success of the video. Not Kony’s atrocities.

A day after the viral focus wore off, the focus turned to allegations that Invisible Children was not passing through its donations to the victims of Kony.

Different goals

The problem with this focus and these allegations, of course, is that Invisible Children’s goal is to bring attention to the genocide and not to provide funding for the victims. In this regard, they are a different kind of relief agency.

Again, their goal is to bring the issue of kidnapped and murdered children to the attention of the world. And that kind of publicity costs money, which is where many of the donations go.

The next day, the focus of the story turned to something else – something more titillating and – again – off the focus of Kony. This time the focus of the media was on amateur video showing the Jason Russell, filmmaker of Kony 2012, behaving erratically in the nude on a San Diego neighborhood street.

He was taken to a hospital and was later diagnosed with a condition known as brief reactive psychosis.

“Though this is new to us, the doctors say this is a common experience given the great mental, emotional and physical shock his body has gone through in these last two weeks,” his wife Danica Russell told reporters.

Brief reactive psychosis is a condition caused by extreme stress, something which fits Russell’s experience. He will remain in the hospital for several weeks and undergo treatment for it.

3 chances, 3 misses

So, we’ve had three rounds of high-profile stories over the past two weeks on the efforts of the Invisible Children organization, but none of them has had to do with Joseph Kony, his atrocities in East Africa, or the need to find him and arrest him.

Am I missing something here?

Leon Panetta was not alone in his assessment of threats to the United States.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has said, “I do believe that the cyberthreat will equal or surpass the threat from counterterrorism in the foreseeable future.”

In this photo taken Aug. 22, 2010 and released by the International Iran Photo Agency, a worker stands at the entrance of the reactor of an Iranian nuclear power plant. The computer virus Stuxnet targeted Iran's nuclear enrichment facility before being discovered. The virus could be used against other countries, including the U.S. (AP Photo/IIPA, Ebrahim Norouzi)

A ticking clock

And Mike Rogers, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee in the House of Representatives has warned, “We will suffer a catastrophic cyberattack. The clock is ticking.”

Cyberterrorism is not a new concept, but it is not one widely discussed, understood, or even feared by most Americans. We seem much more concerned – justifiably so – about another massive physical attack like 9/11.

But a report on CBS’s TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes, and a detailed report in last July’s Wired Magazine, show just how dangerous a well-designed cyberattack could be on the United States.

The weapon exists

What’s even more worrisome, is that the virus that could wreak such havoc has already been developed, tried and found successful in another part of the world. Worse yet, that malware can be copied by others, may have already been done so, and could be repurposed and used for just a couple million dollars.

That cost is obviously not a factor by a large terrorist group or a failed country’s regime wanting to exact revenge on America.

Stuxnet

The latest and most sophisticated “worm” or malware is called Stuxnet and was discovered accidentally in 2010 as it was attacking the controlling computer in Iran’s nuclear uranium enrichment facility.

That attack had been underway for a year before discovery and had rendered thousands of the plant’s centrifuges – devices used to enrich uranium – useless. Estimates are that Iran’s nuclear production process was set back several years as a result.

A new era

Retired Gen. Mike Hayden told reporter Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes, “We have entered into a new phase of conflict in which we use a cyberweapon to create physical destruction and, in this case, physical destruction in someone else’s critical infrastructure.” That infrastructure could be nuclear plants, massive electrical power grids, water treatment plants, air traffic control facilities, and so on.

As former director of both the CIA and national security, Hayden should know what he’s talking about. He left the CIA in 2009 and refused to speculate to Kroft on any possible CIA involvement.

Although no one has taken responsibility for developing Stuxnet, the only two countries with the capability and motives for damaging Iran’s nuclear efforts in this way seem to be the United States and Israel.

A schematic of a gas centrifuge used for uranium enrichment. Many of these were rendered useless by the Stuxnet worm. (AP Photo/International Atomic Energy Agency)

No takers

Not surprisingly, neither country’s intelligence agencies are taking responsibility for it.

Stuxnet is unlike the millions of other computer viruses in existence. It is not designed to steal passwords or individual identities, and it isn’t out to unleash its attack on all the computers it infects.  Instead, it was designed to target and infect one particular computer and to perform a specific task in that computer.

Target: Iran

The computer is the main one at Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment plant, and the task was to cause the plant’s centrifuges to spin much faster than they were designed to do, destroying them in the process.  If left unchecked, Stuxnet could totally halt the plant’s ability to enrich uranium.

According to Wired Magazine, Stuxnet uses a rare “zero-day” exploit to spread the virus in a computer.

“Zero-days are the hacking world’s most potent weapons: they exploit vulnerabilities in software that are yet unknown to the software maker or antivirus vendors,” writes Kim Zetter. “They’re also exceedingly rare: it takes considerable skill and persistence to find such vulnerabilities and exploit them. Out of more than 12 million pieces of malware that antivirus researchers discover each year, fewer than a dozen use a zero-day exploit.”

What virus?

Another difference between Stuxnet and other computer worms is that this one masked the fact that it even existed. Generally, when a virus attacks a computer, the user is the first to realize it. Not so with Stuxnet. It is left free to do its damage without being readily detected.

In the case of Stuxnet, it was doing its work in the Natanz computer for a year before a computer security firm in Belarus discovered it. By then, thousands of the nuclear enrichment plant’s centrifuges had been destroyed and needed to be replaced.

If all the concern over Stuxnet were related to its ability to halt Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, few in the world would be concerned at all.  It would be hard to find any Americans, in fact, who wouldn’t cheer its development.

A reusable weapon

The problem is that a cyberweapon – in this case the Stuxnet malware – doesn’t destroy itself when it is used in the way a missile, bomb, or rocket would. A cyberweapon does its damage and continues to live on.

That means the weapon is still available for use by anyone who can access it.

“There are those out there who can take a look at this, study it and maybe even attempt to turn it to their own purposes,” Gen. Hayden said.

The phrase, “unintended consequences” was used more than once by the sources. In short, it could be used against the United States.

A genie named Pandora

So the genie appears to have escaped the bottle, although repurposing and using it would require a lot of intelligence and a lot of work.

Ralph Langner, a German industrial security expert,  said, “You don’t need many billions; you just need a couple of millions. And this would buy you a decent cyberattack, for example, against the U.S. power grid. (And you can access it) on the Internet.

Pesky thing, that Pandora’s Box.

This comment comes from Senior English major Tara Donavanik, writing in the student newspaper The Clause,at California’s Azusa Pacific University.

An unidentified University of Missouri student browses her Facebook account while in class. While still immensely popular, Facebook may be losing its allure for many college students as the site's demographics are skewing older. (AP Photo/L.G. Patterson)

She is uttering what some are wondering about Facebook and Myspace: Are they losing their allure, at least to young people?

Interesting data

Some 2010 data from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Social Network Site Survey indicates the answer is yes. The answer seems clearer that college students have moved away from MySpace (only 12% of undergraduates and 6% of grad students use it), but the data for Facebook shows declines, too.

For a site that was started by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg as a way for college students to connect, fewer students appear to be using Facebook.

According to the Pew results, only 1 in 5 undergrads regularly uses Facebook, while only 15% of grad students use it.

Data for both MySpace and Facebook seem stronger at the high school level, with more than 1 in 3 (35%) of high school students using MySpace, and 26% using Facebook).

A possible reason

Offering up her own take on the data, Donavanik notes, “Maybe as we get older, time becomes of essence and curiosity about an ex or an acquaintance becomes low on our priority list.”

According to the Pew data, age influences the choice of an individual’s social networking site. For example, Linkedin is a popular network site that people use to develop and maintain career connections, although it is also used to exchange social information as well. But because it is more career-oriented (and even career-enhancing), some 37% of undergrad college students and 38% of grad students were using it in 2010. One would assume those numbers are even higher today.

Twitter accounts for 21% of college student use, while other SNS sites like Instagram, account for another 14% of college usage.

Although Facebook logs a smaller percentage of college students than Linkedin, the Pew study does show FB to have the largest share of daily visits by its users, while LinkedIn users visit the site once a month or even less.

35 and older growth

Indeed, the growth among users of social network sites has been in the post-college generation of older adults. The Pew Center study summarizes this as follows:

“Internet users of all ages are more likely to use a SNS today than they were in 2008. However, the increase in SNS use has been most pronounced among those who are over the age of 35. In 2008 only 18% of internet users 36 and older used a SNS, by 2010 48% of internet users over the age of 35 were using a SNS.

“This is about twice the growth experienced by internet users 18-35; 63% of whom used a SNS in 2008 compared with 80% in 2010. Among other things, this means the average age of adult-SNS users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010. Over half of all adult SNS users are now over the age of 35.”

Many older Facebook users find themselves reuniting with long-lost high school friends, and often these users are over 60 as in the case of these Ohioians who got together recently to talk about the high school days. (AP Photo/News-Messenger, David Distlehorst)

Usage still strong

Overall, the Pew Research Center data shows the following about the demographics of all Internet users, as per its August 2011 survey:

* Percent of all adults who use the Internet: 78%.

* Men outnumber women slightly (80 to 76%).

* White, Non-Hispanics outnumber Black, Non-Hispanics, 80-71%. Some 68% of Hispanics use the Web.

* Ninety-four percent of those 18-29 use the Web; 87 percent of those 30-49; 74% of those 50-64, and 41% of those 65 and older.

* For household incomes over $75K, Internet usage is almost 100%; for household incomes less than $30K, usage is at 62%

* For those with no high school diploma, Internet use is at 43%; for high school grads, it is 71%; for college grads, usage is 94%.

The tone of comments

The Pew Center has also studied the overall “tone” or mood of comments on social networking sites (SNS) and has found the following:

* 85% of SNS-using adults say their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind.

* 68% say they have had an SNS experience that made them feel good about themselves.

* 61% had experiences that made them feel closer to another person.

* 39% say they frequently see acts of generosity by other SNS users.

Nevertheless, Pew says that “notable proportions of SNS users do witness bad behavior on those sites and nearly a third have experienced some negative outcomes from their experiences.”

For example nearly half of SNS-using adults say they have seen mean or cruel behavior displayed by others at least occasionally.

Teenage usage

When it comes to teenage SNS-users, Pew discovered that 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online, and that 80% of those online teens use social media sites.

Further, the experiences teens have concerning the tone of the comments posted on the site is different from adult experiences. For example, only 69% of teens think their peers are mostly kind to each other on social network sites. Another 20% say peers are mostly unkind. Only 5% of the adult SNS-users reported people to be mostly unkind.

Cruelties on the sites

Further, Pew says 88% of teens using social networks have seen someone be mean or cruel to another person on an SNS, and 12% reported those incidents to be “frequent.” Only 7% of adults reported seeing this kind of treatment frequently.

When it comes to the sensitive subject of bullying, nearly 1 in 5 teens (19%) said they have been bullied in the past year, often online or via text.

According to Pew, teens who use social networks say, “People most often appear to ignore the situation, with a slightly smaller number of teen saying they see others defending someone and telling others to stop their cruel behavior.”

Revealing conclusions

Other Pew studies have revealed the following effects of SNS-sites on users, which go toward balancing the scales some from last week’s post on this site. That post discussed the isolating effects of the social media, but Pew data show there is also a socializing effect as well.

Some of these conclusions are:

* Facebook users are more trusting than others.

* Facebook users have more close relationships.

* Facebook users get more social support than other people.

* Facebook users are much more politically engaged than most people.

* Facebook revives “dormant” relationships. (22% of those are from high school years, in fact.)

In some ways, you’d be right if you consider each of us to be actors on the world’s stage as we go about living our lives, interacting with others, and trying to project a self that rings true — or not.

Yet each of these three books is not about movies, but about what has happened to our lives in the age of computers, the Internet, and the Web 2.0 media.

This computer-generated image provided in 2007 by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., shows him as an online "avatar" standing in front of a computerized image of the United Nations climate change summit on the Internet-based virtual reality community Second Life. Markey couldn't make it to Bali for the summit so he sent the next best thing: an avatar or himself. Markey addressed the meeting through the avatar. (AP Photo/The Office of U.S. Rep. Edward Markey)

Self-Definition

The books are about how we go about defining ourselves, to ourselves and others, in the age where RL meets VR in the MUD.

For the yet-uninitiated, that means Real Life meeting Virtual Reality in the Multi-User Domain.

The books are all written by Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor of Technology and Society, and they span the years of 1997-2011. Taken individually or together, they show how our current age is different from any previous era humankind has ever encountered.

Reverse expectations

A nicely written excerpt from Publisher’s Weekly presents the gist of Turkle’s latest work, Alone Together, which has the provocative subtitle, Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

 “Turkle argues that people are increasingly functioning without face-to-face contact. For all the talk of convenience and connection derived from texting, e-mailing, and social networking, Turkle reaffirms that what humans still instinctively need is each other.

“She encounters dissatisfaction and alienation among users: teenagers whose identities are shaped not by self-exploration but by how they are perceived by the online collective, mothers who feel texting makes communicating with their children more frequent yet less substantive, Facebook users who feel shallow status updates devalue the true intimacies of friendships.”

A sobering thought

The disturbing conclusion is, “Turkle ‘s prescient book makes a strong case that what was meant to be a way to facilitate communications has pushed people closer to their machines and further away from each other.”

Some heavy Internet users find themselves losing control to the virtual reality of the Web and losing contact with real people in their lives. While medical science has made good use of virutal reality platforms to help in physical therapy as in the above case, many just find the Web 2.0 media pulling them deeper into detachment. (AP Photo/Oded Bality)

On several levels, that seems so. Anytime we see two people who are presumably on a date at a restaurant, yet there they sit more engaged in their I-phones or Droids, we get the picture.

Indeed one of the funnier commercials on television depicts two of these individuals. The woman is trying to have a real conversation with her date while suspecting he is more involved in checking game scores on his smart phone. And the reason it is so funny is because it is so true. We’ve all been a part of this scene, no?

Things that aren’t real

Carl Hays, a writer for Booklist, notes the following irony found in Turkle’s examination of the interface between humanity and technology:

“Turkle suggests that we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.

“In her university-sponsored studies surveying everything from text-message usage among teens to the use of robotic baby seals in nursing homes for companionship, Turkle paints a sobering and paradoxical portrait of human disconnectedness in the face of expanding virtual connections in cell-phone, intelligent machine, and Internet usage.”

Respecting machines

When we are in the presence of a friend or loved one yet choose to focus our attention on the machine in our hand, we are in fact treating the machine with more respect; treating it as if it is more real than the person sitting next to us.

What makes Turkle’s observation more intriguing is that she has been making them for so long. Life on the Screen was published in 1997. How computer-savvy were you fifteen years ago? Did you even have an Internet connection in your home then?

Still, in that book Turkle posited that the Internet, with its bulletin boards, games, virtual communities,  and private domains where people meet, develop relationships or emulate sex, is a microcosm of an emerging “culture of simulation” that substitutes representations of reality for the real world.

New pathways

What we had in 1997, Turkle said, was a new way of developing an identity. This new pathway was “de-centered and multiple,” meaning it was created outside of our beings; that we used multiple Internet means and models for creating a sense of who we are as unique individuals.

If it was true then, especially for the more malleable minds of the young, how much more true might it be today as the Web has gone through mega-changes since 1997?

Confusing worlds

As one college student put it, “RL is just one more window, and it’s usually not my best.” The haunting thing here is that he is considering the worlds he inhabits through his computer as real life. He is discussing the time he spends as four different characters – avatars – in three different MUDs. Add in the time he spends doing his homework on his computer, and he lives more of his life there than apart from it.

This kind of life requires people like this student to split themselves into different selves, turning on one self and then morphing into another, as he cycles from window to window on the screen. He believes it allows him to explore different possibilities of who he might be.

Some simply say, “The Internet lets you be who you pretend to be.”

A 2001 flashback

And, in an unsettling flashback to older generations of scenes from Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, we seem to be losing our self-control to computers. As those space travelers did, we no longer give commands to our computers; we have dialogues with them.

And often, the computers seem to have the last word.

Somewhere around Thanksgiving I got hooked into this addictive game which, along with other games like Hanging with Friends and the (non-interactive) Angry Birds are taking up a lot of people’s times these days.

Words with Friends, an interactive online game that looks a lot like Scrabble, comes from the company Zynga and is becoming a ubiquitous pasttime for many people these days. (Screenshot from the Zynga web site).

Popularity rising

With its ubiquitous accessibility, via terminal, laptop, notebook, or smart phone, Word with Friends seems, indeed, to be everywhere. And with its links to Facebook, many of the moves you make show up on your wall, thereby advertising its presence to many others and the many others who have befriended those many others.

Who wouldn’t want it known that their best achievement of the day was scoring 131 points by their adroit playing of the word “djebel?”

A domino effect

It’s the well-known domino effect, and it now has more than 3 million Facebook users “liking” this game, and probably wasting a lot of otherwise productive hours playing it.

Those prone to finding their glasses to be half-full as opposed to seriously leaking,  would point out that you can increase your vocabulary with such word games as this thinly-veiled version of the classic game of Scrabble.

Hmmm…

I suppose my reaction would be, True if you think any of the following kinds of words will be useful for you in the conversations of life:

Qi, qat, xi, vodoun, oedemas, yegg (egg with an extra-large yoke?), quin, jeux, nixe, nae, qua, tael, ratel, eclat, recta (2 rectums?) and quean.

Or how about rec, rem, urd, mae, ecu, kex, kae, and jauk?

All these and many other wonderful words are legitimate parts of the King’s speech, according to your friends at Words with Friends. And of course we use these gems all the time in our everyday chats. These are the words that come tripping off our tongue when we are confronted with six consonants and a vowel (or, worse yet, the opposite). Right?

Too scrambled?

Well, only right if we are using a handy-dandy word unscrambler. Or is that descrambler? Neither seems to find favor with the text program I’m using now.

These descramblers bring up a serious ethical issue, of course, to players of WWF: Is it cheating to

What drives so many to playing interactive games late at night? The answers are many, but the results can vary. (AP Photo).

use a crutch like that? Or is a descrambler really a crutch? Might it merely help you to unclutter all the knowledge of universe  you already possess so that you can get right to these words that you already knew so well?

The tree and the thud

And, like the tree no one ever saw or heard falling in the wilderness, does it matter if no one hears it? Would Aristotle or Immanuel Kant insist that you come clean and tell your opponent you’re using a descrambler before starting the match? And if BOTH of you use that aid, does that negate the ethical quandary and create an even and virtuous playing field? Or is it that you are both now cheating?

But if you’re both cheating, why play the game at all?

The game of life

The backers of WWF would say that playing this game allows each of us to come face to face with deep and important ethical principles which can only help us out in the rest of the game of life.

This all, of course, presumes that people are actually playing WWF and not just logging on to use the chat box, which is one great way of getting around paying for a text package on your cell phone, especially since you can access WWF on that very phone and text until your heart’s content — or until you run out of words — for free.

A serious side

Proving once again, however, that there is an upside to everyone wasting time on the Web, consider the following story posted just today by CBS News:

“Beth Legler, of Blue Springs, Missouri, began playing Words with Friends more than two years ago on her cell phone, reports KCTV CBS 5 in Kansas City. That’s when she met an Australian couple named Georgie and Simon Fletcher of Queensland, Australia.

“One day during a game, Georgie told Beth that Simon was feeling under the weather, so Beth asked her to describe his symptoms, since Beth’s own husband, Larry, was a doctor.

“When hearing that Simon was experiencing fatigue so severe that he couldn’t walk to his mailbox and burning in the back of his throat, reports MSNBC, Dr. Legler had some words of advice for his wife’s online friends: get to a doctor immediately.

“Legler thought Simon was experiencing angina, a condition that occurs when your heart doesn’t get enough oxygen-rich blood. That causes pressure or squeezing in the chest, but could cause pain elsewhere in the body like in the shoulders, arms, neck, or back. What usually causes angina? Heart disease.

“Simon was reluctant but went to the doctor, and as it turns out, Dr. Legler was right: Simon had a 99 percent blockage in his artery and was on death’s door.

“Simon had two stents implanted through emergency surgery, and has recovered. ‘I owe Larry everything,’ Simon told KCTV. “I’m really lucky to be here.”

“Said Beth, ‘It’s been a wonderful experience to have had made some great friends and know that Simon is well because of a word game.’”

Wow. I’m speechless. Or is that aphonic?

Although he has a passion for writing westerns of both period and modern vintage, McMurtry explodes the stereotype of what a writer of westerns is all about.  That’s one of the reasons I like his books so much.

Novelist Larry McMurtry put his one-stoplight hometown on the map with "the Last Picture Show," and continues to draw tourists there with his bookstore called, Booked Up. The store survived the economic crisis that put many booksellers out of business. The novelist believes printed books will likewise survive the e-book. (AP Photo/Arizona Daily Star, David Sanders)

Books in his saddlebags

I’ve never been in McMurtry’s home but, I bet that in place of a Winchester rifle and crossed branding irons above a massive fireplace, you would find rows of books packed into wall-to-wall shelving.

I get that image because Larry McMurtry is a guy in love with books.

How do I know that? Because the guy owns one of the larger antiquarian bookstores around, called Booked Up, that comprises four buildings and contains some 400,000 books. That’s bigger than a lot of college libraries, and it’s not found in Houston or Dallas but way out in Archer City, Texas. If that town sounds vaguely familiar, go check out McMurtry’s breakthrough novel, The Last Picture Show or its sequel, Texasville.

This is one literate cowboy.

A vexing question

Because I admire McMurtry the author so much, I plopped down $6.95 plus tax for the current issue of Harper’s Magazine at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport the other day. The article catching my eye was one by McMurtry asking the provocative question, “Will Amazon kill the book?”

Since this is one big-time bookseller asking the question about another, I thought McMurtry might just be the right guy to answer that question.

He did, and the answer is no.

This, despite the Amazon CEO’s apparent desire to see books go to the back of the shelf. Keep in mind we’re talking about the kind of printed book that the world has known for the past 500 years or so, ever since Johannes Gutenberg started cranking them with his movable type.

One Click

Reviewing Richard L. Brandt’s book, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com, McMurtry is quick to give credit to Amazon’s founder as a creative genius. In fact, his review begins by noting the following:

“If the late Steve Jobs was the Thomas Edison de nos jours, perhaps the ever-present Jeff Bezos of Amazon is our Henry Ford. Both Bezos and Ford had a single culture-changing idea that they executed doggedly until the culture came round.”

The Kindle: Year 4

McMurtry is referring not only to the creation of the gigantic online flea market we know as Amazon.com, but also to the new kind of electronic book reader that Amazon launched in 2007 that we know as the Kindle.

But McMurtry disagrees with Bezos that the e-book is going to render ink-on-paper books obsolete as we all migrate to the e-screen of Kindle and – although Bezos might not acknowledge it – the Barnes & Noble version called the Nook.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon are betting that this Kindle Fire will continue to rope in e-book readers. Amazon announced that this Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle famlly, and the Kindle Fire remained the bestselling product across all of Amazon since its introduction in September. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

I wrote about these new technologies a couple years ago in this blog, asking the question, “Will the e-book catch on?” Certainly the sales that Amazon is touting of Kindle seem to indicate they are indeed catching on.  But my own personal observations, made over the past year on my college campus of 5,200 undergrads, indicate otherwise. I just don’t see that many students sitting under the trees reading e-books.

Doubting the worst

McMurtry, doubts that e-books will wipe out traditional tomes. Keep in mind, however, he has a financial interest in the health of the printed book. He does have to pay the utilities for all that bookstore space out in Archer city. Nevertheless, he writes:

“Less attractive about Bezos is his obvious irritation at the continued existence of the paperbound book, which provides, still, serious competition to sales of his e-book device, the Kindle.

 “He has pointed out that the traditional book has had a 500-year run; he clearly thinks it’s time for those relics to sort of shuffle offstage. Then he will no longer be bothered with old-timey objects that have the temerity to flop open and cause one to lose one’s place.”

 Bubbles can burst

Acknowledging the opening-weekend kind of success the Kindle is having, McMurtry cautions, “The culture has surged in the direction of e-books, but the surge might not go on forever. It might be a bubble.”

Those of us who have felt the deep satisfaction of taking our time to browse through a bookstore – large or small – and walking out with more than we expected to buy, can appreciate where McMurtry is coming from.

And that kind of customer satisfaction, especially of finding the unexpected volume that had long eluded us elsewhere, is not always such an accident.  Again McMurtry writes, “Stirring the curiosity of readers is a vital part of bookselling; skimming a few strange pages is surely as important as making one click.”

 Is older better?

Every time I cast my lot with traditionalists who say the older is better than the newer, I know I run the risk of sounding my age. In fact, the older is not always better. As a writer and a college professor, I know what research used to be like in musty old libraries vs. what it is like now with the library sitting on my lap as those needed references appear in seconds rather than hours.

Still I hasten to add that reading from the printed page in a nicely bound book that you can keep as a reminder in plain sight after you’re finished, is nothing to write off so easily.

At least it doesn’t require a battery or a frantic call to the Geek Squad if the e-reader refuses to waken from its zzzzzzz’s.