Today, text messaging has eclipsed the telephone call to become the most frequent form of communication among U.S. teenagers. The average adult spends more than 18 hours per week on the Internet. Ipsos Reid recently reported a 35% decrease in e-mail received, but it’s really a shift in consumption to emerging communications platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and various Instant Messengers. Facebook users send an average of 16 messages inside of that platform each week. Those using MSN Messenger or Blackberry Messenger are sending even more messages on a weekly basis. There’s no question that technology has overrun our lives. Over the past century, the world has welcomed technological ‘progress’ with arms wide open and we’re living with the clicking, dinging, anxiety-inducing deluge of it. But a creative backlash is underway, helping human beings cope with the avalanche of data that passes in front of most of us every day through the use of computers and cell phones. Slow food, the back-to-the-land movement, and groups like letter writing clubs are being formed by a new subculture: the 21st century luddite, wielding fountain pen and notebook, and some checking e-mail from the public library a mere hour per week. Dolen and Fedoruk think this movement is more than a blip on the technological continuum.
more from Christina Crook at The Curator here.