Headline June 26, 2015/ "' THE DICTATORSHIP[S] OF CONSTANT CONTACT "'

"' THE DICTATORSHIP[S] OF 

CONSTANT CONTACT "'

LIKE THIS BEAUTY MADONNA, confessing that during her marriage to Guy Ritchie each kept a  BlackBerry tucked under their pillows at night, we have to keep up standards, too?

If you go to the theater and discover your phone has died, you better borrow a seat mate's  phone and pre-emptively call the last five people you spoke to; if there's a glitch in Gmail-

You better start checking your other portals with an assiduousness that verges on the robotic.

In my own effort to stay afloat the  data surf, I subscribe to two policies. First, if it takes more than 24 hours to respond to an email, I'll apologize to the sender; after a day, the failure to respond betrays disinterest, concern or alcohol poisoning.

Second, is the intimacy-based communications hierarchy [with a face-to-face meeting or a phone call being at the top, and trying a message to a rock and then burying the rock in the dirt being at the bottom]-

I try always to meet the incoming vehicle at the level or higher. You can't answer a phone call with a message on FarmVille. 

*Feeling the need to be accessible at all hours of the day is a damn huge struggle.*

"Everything I know about the Internet,"  I learned from my 87 years old mother, writes this super author.  "Like the harder you hit   'Send'    the faster the email travels.

If you want wholly to colonize your reader's subconscious, just end your txt message or email right in the middle of the.  If you're still not sure that your reader is fully invested-

SIMPLY LEAN ON YOUR CAPS LOCK TO IMBUE YOUR MISSIVE WITH A THROBBING IMMEDIACY.

But Mom's larger message is that the Internet and cellphones have created a kind of tyranny of connectedness: Even those of us who don't have children or jobs with the State Department, it seems, now need to be accessible at all hours of the day.

It's as if we're doctors on call. 

WHEN SHE WAS A SOPHOMORE at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2011,  Elisabeth Chramer and her communications class-

Were asked by their professor to refrain from any cell-phone or electronic use for 72 hours.

"There were a few students who could complete the assignment," she said. "They just could not isolate themselves." Ms. Chramer, who now operates her own customized embroidery company, added-

That one of the huge challenges of communicating with the members of her generation is their varied response time. "It's either instantaneous or it's a week later. People go from platform to platform. You have to catch them while they're on a certain platform, or you wait a week."

The more messaging platforms and types of social media that we welcome into the world, the more our communication skills are scattered and made diffuse.

Thus it's interesting to see the workarounds that people use to keep their interactions from dissolving into a meaningless spray of pixels.

The entrepreneur and philanthropist  Jean Paul De Joria, a founder of the Patron Spirits Company and the Paul Mitchell line of  hair products ,  does not use email even though he presides over a multibillion-dollar empire.

"I would be so inundated that I wouldn't be able to get off the computer," he said. "My executive director only brings me messages that are important. I teach the people around me to pay attention to the vital few and ignore the trivial many."

Mr.De.Joria added: "A personal phone call to someone means the world to me. Or if someone writes me a letter and there's enough room in on that letter, I will handwrite my answer on the letter and either mail it back or, if they have a fax, fax it back to them." 

Mr. Marsalis, who wrote a children's book :  "No Cell Phone Day" about a father and a daughter who spend the best day of their lives when they temporarily  put aside mobile technology, said that he often imposes restrictions on his 14-years old daughter and her friends.

"I won't allow cell phones in the car,"  he said. "When her cousins come to visit, I tell their parents, "You're child will not  be available to you for the next four hours," Mr, Marsalis said the parents reaction is usually rhapsodic.

But workarounds, of course, can work around in the other direction, too.

When Washington magazine published an article in January about about Green Bank, W.Va where a wireless Internet is is outlawed because the town is host to a high-tech government telescope  "so sensitive that it can pick up the energy equivalent of a single snowflake hitting the ground."

The magazine also reported that, according to one seventh grader, many students in the area connect to home  Wi-Fi  networks and then use the texting functions in Facebook and  Snapchat to talk to their friends.

**In the end, it may be all but impossible to keep ourselves from scattering our online attention to the point of meaninglessness.** 

Eschewing the Internet altogether is an option. One elderly user estimates that about half the seniors in her retirement community aren't online.

"A lot of them are scared to death by the whole idea,  by the infernal machine," she told me.

"You know the pathetic fallacy, where you  ascribe human qualities to nonhuman things?  It's that. They ascribe human qualities to the computer. Like the computer is going to reach out and grab them."

They're entirely right.

With respectful dedication to all the Students, Professors and Teachers, all the users of technology, the world over. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

"' Unbuttoned "'

'''Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless