Have you ever realized that you left your house without your cell phone, and no matter how far/near you were to your destination, you found yourself turned around, heading back for your phone?

Sure you have…Don’t deny it.

Immediately lost at sea is how you feel without your phone, and you know it.

However too much connectivity, to anyone, any place, anything…

Is it possible that it could be a bad thing?

[via io9] Do you feel more lonely after using your smart phone?

In a recently-posted TED talk, MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle explains why people who are constantly tethered to their smart phones feel so alone. She argues that loneliness in the age of social media has become far more crippling than ever before in history. But is she right that connectivity is driving us apart?

The Fantasy of the Smart Phone

The strongest and most brilliant part of Turkle’s talk, based on her recent book Alone Together, is when she carefully breaks down the way that smart phones embody three potent human fantasies. First, they give us the illusion that we have complete control over where we direct our attention. We can always use them to tune out when something in the real world is boring or annoying us. Second, they make us feel like we can always be heard, because we can broadcast our thoughts via social media, texts, or email whenever we want. And third, they promise a life where we are never lonely because we are always in touch with “friends” and “events” online.

If you have ever wondered why people clutch their phones like absurdly tiny lifeboats that require constant upgrades, Turkle’s analysis of phone-as-fantasy explains why. Sure, we need our phones for purely practical reasons. But our emotional attachment to them is way out of proportion to our daily needs. [Read More]

Oh?

More than likely.

For you see, the more technological connectivity available TO us?

The less we are likely to for any real-life, physical connections.

[via The Atlantic]Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? [...]

We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

At the forefront of all this unexpectedly lonely interactivity is Facebook, with 845 million users and $3.7 billion in revenue last year. The company hopes to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering later this spring, which will make it by far the largest Internet IPO in history. Some recent estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry—one addiction preparing to surpass the other. Facebook’s scale and reach are hard to comprehend: last summer, Facebook became, by some counts, the first Web site to receive 1 trillion page views in a month. In the last three months of 2011, users generated an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments every day. On whatever scale you care to judge Facebook—as a company, as a culture, as a country—it is vast beyond imagination.

Despite its immense popularity, or more likely because of it, Facebook has, from the beginning, been under something of a cloud of suspicion. The depiction of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network, as a bastard with symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, was nonsense. But it felt true. It felt true to Facebook, if not to Zuckerberg. The film’s most indelible scene, the one that may well have earned it an Oscar, was the final, silent shot of an anomic Zuckerberg sending out a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, then waiting and clicking and waiting and clicking—a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber. We have all been in that scene: transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response. [Read More]

Technology…

With all of its infinite connections?

For us, its seems has turned us all into very lonely people.