I can vouch for this:
The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is adults thirty-five to forty-four. Conventional wisdom stresses how different these adults are from their children – laying out fundamental divides between those who migrated to digital worlds and those who are its “nativesâ€. But the migrants and natives share a lot: perhaps above all, the feeling ofbeing overwhelmed. If teenagers, overwhelmed with demands for academic and sexual performance, have come to treat online life as a place to hide and draw some lines, then their parents, claiming exhaustion, strive to exert greater control over what reaches them. And the only way to filter effectively is to keep most communications online and text based.
p. 202 Alone Together
I’ve seen a very distinct move in this direction. It seems to have struck the voice mail as well. I have had several instances where I leave a voice mail message with clear request/preference to talk via phone, and I get a Facebook message back, as if they were suggesting that this should do as a response, even if the Facebook message makes no attempt to acknowledge or address the original voice mail in any way. Do people realize how close that comes to seeming like “get outta here I’m too busy†? If they’re not, then that itself is a good indicator that their digital habits have begun to work on their management of their friends and acquaintances.
(And this has been happening for 2-3 years in my experience. I didn’t come to that conclusion because of , say, today or yesterday. I point it out because I just read the above and I nodded and said to myself: “You got that rightâ€!)
In the church, we have people at various stages of this utilization of the distance and management mode of Social Networking. There is a distinct movement away from the phone as a social tool. I find myself resisting that mode.
