[quote=NYT]
T was a vision of family togetherness out of a Norman Rockwell painting, if Rockwell had worked in the era of WiFi. After a taco dinner one Wednesday in March, Dianne Vavra and her family retreated to the living room of their Cape Cod-style house in Huntington, N.Y., where they curled up on the spacious beige sofa amid hand-stitched quilts as an icy rain pelted the windows.
Ms. Vavra, a cosmetics industry executive in Manhattan, looked up from her iPad, where she was catching up on the latest spring looks at Refinery29.com, and noticed that her husband, Michael Combs, was transfixed, streaming the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament on his laptop. Their son, Tom, 8, was absorbed by the Wii game Mario Kart on the widescreen television. Their daughter, Eve, 10, was fiddling with a game app called the Love Calculator on an iPod Touch. “The family was in the same room, but not together,” Ms. Vavra recalled.
One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities, basically. While it may look like some domestic version of “The Matrix” — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon.
Call it what you will, it is a wholly different form of quality time.
The culture of home-based iDistraction has already become a pop-culture trope, and no wonder: Never has there been so much to consume, on so many devices. On a recent episode of ABC’s “Modern Family,” the character Claire Dunphy explodes when she tries to serve the family breakfast, only to be ignored by a husband adjusting his fantasy baseball roster on his iPad, a son playing video games on his PSP and two daughters e-mailing each other from across the table. “O.K., now that’s it, everybody, gadgets down, now!” she declares. “You’re all so involved in your little gizmos, nobody is even talking. Families are supposed to talk!”
Haley, the eldest daughter, writes to her sister, Alex, “Mom’s insane,” as everyone returns to their screens.
Billy Crystal, in an interview with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” joked that couples these days have no qualms about texting someone else during sex — “Oh, is that you!” “Yes!” “LOL!”
CERTAINLY, people have been hyper-wired as long as there have been laptops, and the tendency became more pronounced with the advent of wireless Internet. Nearly 60 percent of American families with children own two or more computers, and more than 60 percent of those have either a wired or wireless network to connect to the Internet, according to studies by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. A third of all Americans log on from home multiple times a day, nearly twice the number that did so in 2004.
On top of that, iPads have inundated homes since they were introduced a year ago, as have fast-downloading smartphones. Media companies are jumping on board to make sure their content is available at any time, on any device. In the last six months, Netflix has added thousands of movies available for instant streaming, via its Watch Instantly option. In March, Time Warner Cable made selected channels available on an iPad app. Subscribers to MLB.TV can stream major league baseball games any day of the week through a $14.99 iPhone app. And Amazon recently announced a plan to make e-books from 11,000 public libraries available on its Kindle this year.
That amounts to more screen time in homes where everyone already seems glued to their BlackBerrys or sucked in by Facebook, Twitter, blogs — or work.
It’s a profound shift, and one that is not lost on cultural theorists who study the online habits of Americans.
“The transformation of the American living room into a multiscreen communication and entertainment hub” promises to “change our domestic sphere,” said Lutz Koepnick, a media professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies digital culture. “Individual family members might find themselves contently connected to parallel worlds almost all the time.”
Indeed, Brad Kahn, an environmental consultant in Seattle, said he often communicates with his wife, Erin, by e-mail even when they are seated a few feet apart on the sofa with their laptops. He will cut her off if she starts instructing him orally about what he calls his “honey-do” list of weekend chores, he said, and ask her to send it electronically.
To Mr. Kahn, 40, it’s simply more efficient. “If I misunderstood any directions, having a written record can be very useful in maintaining marital bliss,” he said.
Such behavior is not limited to the sofa. Evan Gotlib, who runs advertising sales at blip.tv, an Internet company in Manhattan, recalled sitting in bed recently with his wife, Lindsey Pollak, as both were using iPads. He was playing an online version of Scrabble against his sister, Val, remotely, and at one point said, “Val just got a 46-point word!”
“Ugh,” his wife said, “she just hit a 32-pointer against me.” At that moment, Mr. Gotlib realized his wife was also playing her own game against his sister.
Typically, at their home in Manhattan, Polly Blitzer Wolkstein and her husband, Mark Wolkstein, settle into the sofa around 7 p.m., perch their respective laptops on opposite armrests, place their BlackBerrys between them and surrender to their multiplicity of screens, often until midnight.
[/quote]
Source:
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/fashion/01FAMILY.html?_r=1&hp[/url]
So I must be thankful that my parents have no idea how IT stuff works?
Apparently because there's iPads now this means whatever's been happening for a decade or two with laptops is now news again. Because iPads aren't just touchscreen laptops, right? RIGHT?
[QUOTE=cheesedelux;29568575]Apparently because there's iPads now this means whatever's been happening for a decade or two with laptops is now news again. Because iPads aren't just touchscreen laptops, right? RIGHT?[/QUOTE]
They are iPod touch macro's with revolutionary 3G internet.
So? That whole "family togetherness" schtick has been a lie since the '50s. 50% of marriages end in divorce, so even the idea of a stable family is becoming quaint and outdated. So what if we spend more time connected to things that cater specifically to our interests than we spend irritating each other with forced "togetherness".
[QUOTE=Nirocity;29568689]They are iPod touch macro's with revolutionary 3G internet.[/QUOTE]
Just like how the iPod was just an iPhone without a phone receiver and a GSM radio.
Apple is truly revolutionary lol.
[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;29569733]So? That whole "family togetherness" schtick has been a lie since the '50s. 50% of marriages end in divorce, so even the idea of a stable family is becoming quaint and outdated. So what if we spend more time connected to things that cater specifically to our interests than we spend irritating each other with forced "togetherness".[/QUOTE]
I see, you mean the mobile motto "Keep in Touch" doesn't make any sense after all now does it?
More Luddite bullshit about how technology is bad because it gives us something to do other than shoot the shit with eachother 24/7?
I love it when they use phrases like "WRAPPED UP IN THEIR VIRTUAL REALITIES" and "HUDDLED IN THEIR CYBER-COCOON".
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