Facebook, Flickr or Forget It?

With all that we try to cram into our lives, whose bright idea was it to invent these on-line time consumers that in essence steal from everything else.  Someone needs to write about chat room etiquette, for instance.  It's like being on the phone with an elderly relative who has nothing better to do than talk and talk and you've got twenty different directions  

pulling at you.  You try to sign off and they have just one more thing to say, then just one more, then just one more, then someone else pings you...agh!  

The word ping has taken on a whole new meaning in the 21st century. Ping means connection, it means attention grabber, it means immediate conveyer of information, it means, 

"Get me outta here!"  Pinging turns to obsession which turns to a fat butt because you never leave your chair anymore.  Or, it leads to thumb surgery because you can't stop keying for even a minute or you might miss something.  I wonder if there have been any traffic casualties yet due to texting airheaditis or dementia?

I suppose this just makes me sound like an old fogie but I think there is so much more to do than plant yourself in front of some screen or other.  We are rapidly transitioning from couch potatoes to messaging maniacs (a person characterized by an inordinate or ungovernable enthusiasm for something), people who no longer have the ability to disconnect.

So here I exit, stage left.

On that