TMI?

One of our local football teams, the New York Jets, made it to the AFC championship game this year and I devoted a little over three hours yesterday to watching them compete for the chance to play in the Super Bowl on February 7. The Indianapolis Colts prevailed, but the Jets played well. It was an afternoon well spent.

While watching the game, I also learned that I needed to send some documents to a colleague in Bucharest, Romania, for a project we're working on together; I got an e-mail from a friend in Majorca alerting me to an article of interest in London's Financial Times; and I saw that a former colleague from NBC News, now with PBS in Washington, had accepted my invitation to connect on the social/professional network, LinkedIn. All of this communication came my way via a few finger taps on my iPhone touch screen during time-outs in the Jets-Colts game.

This constant flood of information never stops. I woke up this morning to learn that my daughter in Australia loved the digital photos of her sister I'd e-mailed over the weekend, and that Amazon.com had some great new deals for me in consumer electronics. I checked my bank balance and the weather forecast before I had my first cup of coffee. I'm more connected, to more people and more sources of information, than I've ever been -- and I'm not even on Facebook.

If adults find themselves knee-deep in social media and digital information, you better believe it's a tsunami for kids. In a recent article in the New York Times, Tamar Lewin reported on a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation that shows that "the average young American now spends practically every waking minute -- except for the time in school -- using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device" ("If Your Kids Are Awake, They're Probably Online," 1/20). According to the researchers at Kaiser, "Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cell phones."

None of this is news to parents who have tweens or teens at home, but it's remarkable data all the same. The new media experience may be forcing adults to adapt to a new way of communicating, but it's probably changing the entire life experience of young people in ways we can't yet measure.

The ways we use and interact with media have social consequences, of course, and not all of them are positive. Text messaging means fewer conversations with friends on the telephone, just as online banking means less chitchat with the local bank teller. As time goes on, it seems most of us find we're spending more and more time looking at an electronic screen instead of socializing with our friends or personally interacting with our colleagues.

In "Understanding Media," (required reading when I was an undergrad), Marshall McLuhan wrote that "the personal and social consequences of any medium -- this is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." He summed this up neatly in the phrase, "The medium is the message."

McLuhan died in 1980, years before the original Macintosh computer, not to mention cell phones, laptops and e-books. But he wrote as if he saw it all coming. "One of the effects of living with electric information," he said, "is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with." And that seems to be one of the bigger problems of our time. We're living in an age of too much information ("TMI"), and it's coming at us way too fast.

We can always cut the cord, of course, as the Times reports some Facebook users did recently. Fingers permanently curled over their computer keys, these desperate folks said they'd become so addicted to the social networking site they'd stopped "living life." Similarly, many of us probably know one or two people who refuse to have mobile phones because they don't like the idea of being reachable -- and accountable -- anytime, day or night. Most of us, though, move along with the digital tide, trading in our cell phones for smart phones, and our old Macbooks for the latest Macbook Pros.

For grownups like me, this new electronic age means information and connections at my fingertips, and a chance to catalogue my thoughts, occasionally, on this blog. What it will mean for kids growing up in this new digital century is still anybody's guess.