Patrick Tucker

 This passage is adapted from Patrick Tucker, “The
Over-Mediated World.” ©2007 by The World Future Society.
The average American spends more time using
media—an iPod, computer, radio, television,
etc.—than in any other wakeful activity, almost nine
Line hours a day. Ubiquitous news, e-mail, and
 entertainment are facts of modern life and, not
surprisingly, most of us feel that convenient and
consistent access to the digital world is a good thing.
But what if our new “connected age” is actually
pushing us further apart, making us not more
 informed, but less so? This is the concern of
Michael Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of
Journalism and Communication at Iowa State
University and author of Interpersonal Divide: The
Search for Community in the Technological Age
 (Oxford, 2005).
“Family time at the dinner table used to be
sacrosanct. Nutritionists and psychologists will tell
you that having dinner together uninterrupted is a
good thing. We moved from that to ‘quality time,’
 where both parents were working. Now we’ve gone
from family time to quality time to media time, or
defining activities around media. We spend time
together by using media in proximity to one another,
in the same house or in the same car, but the media
 itself is often separate,” says Bugeja. By way of
example, he points to the common sight of parents
driving and talking on their cell phones while their
kids sit in the backseat and watch a DVD.
“The more we use technology, the less time we
 have to nurture our primary relationships,” says
Bugeja. “The reason is simple: Communications
systems alter value systems. We’re spending more
time communicating via social networks, ignoring
those in our immediate environment. Meanwhile,
 television viewing devours leisure time. Of course
we’re lonely most of the day. We’re searching for
meaningful relationships in front of screens and
monitors.”
The amount of time we spend immersed in the
 media environment affects the way we behave and
interact outside of that space. Students who have
wireless capability on their laptops feel more entitled
to log onto social networking Web sites during
lectures. The intern who has a video game loaded
 onto his cell phone is most likely to be the one
playing the game under the table during an
important meeting. The harried professional is more
inclined to take a call in the middle of a concert,
during dinner, or at some other inappropriate time.
 Media, in its very availability, invites abuse,
according to Bugeja. When such techno-abuses
become commonplace they cease to be taboo, a
phenomenon Bugeja refers to as “digital
displacement.”
 He describes digital displacement as what
happens when the demands of the real world conflict
with those of the virtual, resulting in too many
people paying too much attention to gadgets and
ignoring reality, such as drivers interfacing with
 navigation computers instead of looking out for
pedestrians
While Bugeja doesn’t imagine the situation will
change quickly or easily, he does acknowledge that a
solution exists. “The key is to nurture interpersonal
 intelligence,” he says. “That’s the ability to know
when, where, and for what purpose technology is
appropriate or inappropriate. I don’t believe this
is a problem of the emerging generation. I think
this is a problem of the profiteers of new media. I
 believe the solution is, as it’s always been in this
country, education and information.”

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