When I was a kid, we had a summer home. Not really what you’re thinking – it was much more like rustic living in a cabin. I loved my life there, but it was definitely not the Kennedy’s summer place. One aspect of living out there every summer that I have always remembered was that our phone line was a “party” line. Not exactly a party, though. Multiple families used the same phone line. We had our own phone but it had a certain ring. I think ours was 2 short rings and 1 long ring. If you heard that ring, then the call was for us. Other families had different rings and you didn’t answer their phone. It was weird, even for back then. My Dad’s solution to the whole thing was “don’t use the phone”. Pretty tough with a family made up of a bunch of girls, but that was my Dad’s solution to a lot of things.

Think of that era in contrast to our communication choices today. For about 80 years or so, the world communicated through the land-line phone system with radio and then finally television (3 networks) being folded in to the mix in the 1950’s. That was it. Severely limited, although we certainly didn’t know it at the time.

Now, the options seem endless. In my house of 2 people and one dog, we use 2 laptops for our creative sides, a Smart tv, 3 iPads, and 2 iPhones, and the dog really isn’t using any of those too much. So, that’s 8 devices to stay connected for 2 people. We used to have one phone line for 4 families.

The ability of the US population to communicate is mind-boggling. Using your cellular phone’s camera through social networks, you can now instantly send a picture of the restaurant meal you are about to eat to hundreds of people who don’t give a damn. Through another social network, you can pretend to have a completely different life from the one you are actually living and attempt to induce envy in former high school classmates and bunches of other people that you will never see again in your actual life. It’s called fakebook and it dominates people’s lives. I won’t even begin to discuss Twitter because if I open that up, you know who comes into the conversation. The most remarkable achievement of these times, in my opinion, is the Web. Essentially, at our fingertips, for the first time in history, is all the information available in the world. That’s not too much of an exaggeration and that level of access is truly a marvel. As might be expected, for most of Americans, the Internet is used almost exclusively for shopping and porn. We really are an exceptional country.

The level of penetration of these instruments and networks into our lives is extraordinary. There are approximately 7.6 billion people in the world today (that’s a problem for another essay) of which about 55% (4.1 billion) could be considered urbanized. Last year, 4.02 billion (53% of the world’s population) were internet users. Social media users numbered 3.2 billion (42%) an increase of 13% over the previous year. Mobile phone users were 5.13 billion worldwide. (Interestingly, the number of people in the world who used their mobile phone to make an actual phone call last year was just 47.)

The social media site, facebook, has seen phenomenal growth. Facebook now has more than 2 billion users worldwide and that number grew by more than 500,000 million last year alone. 76% of those users log into the network daily and the average number of daily visits per capita is 8. The influence of facebook on many of its users lives is almost all-encompassing. 8 times a day? And it’s free!

No, it isn’t. It really, really is not free. By using these sites and essentially signing away your privacy rights, you are shoveling your most private information to the corporate world. How has facebook become one of the richest and most influential companies in the world? Not by providing its users a new tool to “stay in touch”. No, facebook is rich by selling your information to the highest bidders. Huge, anonymous, powerful corporations and political organizations now have your information. They know who you are, who you associate with, your interests, your tastes, your sexual mores, where you eat, where you shop, everything. They have it all and they use it. It’s not just that Big Brother is watching. Big Brother is watching, listening, reading, following, querying, anticipating, influencing, marketing, reporting, and selling. It’s really not free.

Is the cost worth the benefit? Maybe it is. I don’t think so, but then again I don’t use facebook. I don’t trust the social network sites and I do not believe they make communications among us better, nor our relationships closer. I think the cost is too great and I’m not the least bit paranoid.

One last point, I know that the use of these devices and sites has caused our personal interactions among the people living with us to deteriorate. The relationships with people to whom we are ostensibly closest have suffered because of our reliance on cell phones and networks. We have all seen the families of 2 parents and 2 children in restaurants waiting for their food with each of their faces firmly planted in their phones and no interactions among them. Where is this going to lead? When was the last time you saw a young family in a restaurant with no cell phones? The other day I saw 4 teenage girls together in a coffee shop and none of them were speaking to each other. All of them were intently staring into their phones. These are 4 teenage girls, all friends, not talking. How is that even possible?

Maybe this is all just the older generation looking askance at the way another generation is behaving. That certainly happens as you get older, the only problem is that I don’t think I’m actually getting older any more. You see I’ve ordered these pills that I saw on the internet that keep a man from aging. They’re great. We all know that they couldn’t sell these things on the Internet if they didn’t work.

But if it is just me getting older and all I’ve said here is wrong, then I apologize for wasting your time. And, by the way, stay off of my lawn! I’m keeping your ball, too.