Is It A Failure to Communicate?

USA TODAY owns the blogosphere with their meme du jure: 2010, the year we stopped talking to each other. Don't take my word for it, google it up.

Is talking a lost art? Is letter writing? Is literature?

Or is it just a nifty exploit of our fear of technology and change.

Just to put my cell provider through the exercise, I get a printed bill each month. It comes in a box sometimes because the detail on the texting done by my teenage daughter; dwarfing her minutes used with texts. So she doesn't talk to her friends. She communicates with them in short bursts more so than her mother did low those many AT&T Slimline Princess phone years ago.

Are we really worried that because the communication isn't verbal that we are losing something as a society? Should we be worried -- as an unnamed psychologist implies in the USA TODAY piece -- that we are disassociating as a society?

Let me ask Abigail about that, as in former First Lady Abigail Adams, unquestionably one of America's greatest correspondents. Her and John Adams' letters were legend. They managed to remain close even though so much of their lives were conducted by written word.

We are a social animal. We crave being connected. Digital tools allow us to crush the time and distance separating people.

Is the worry that we aren't talking to each other in the same room, or that we no longer feel compelled to listen to central distribution points of information? That we now construct our own social graphs, and rearrange them at our own whims.