[Air-L] Query on Research about "Too Much Communication"

[Paul Frosh]

At this year's ICA conference in Singapore Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht gave an opening keynote plenary called 'Infinite Availability: About Hyper-Communication and Old-Age'.  It was a largely a (sophisticated) lament about too much communication (the "hyper-communication" of the title). It began with an anecdote about people texting their loved ones (who are meeting them at the airport) as their plane lands to say that they have arrived, then texting again at passport control, again at the luggage carousel, and again as they go through customs, until the moment of face-to-face contact. 

But I think that one person's hyper-communication may be another's phatic communion.

Here is the abstract. I don't know if the paper is available yet anywhere, but ICA keynote plenaries are often published.

Abstract:
We have more opportunities to communicate than ever before in the history of Homo sapiens. This is the elementary fact that I am referring to with the word "hyper-communication," and I refrain from saying that hyper-communication is either a very good or a very bad thing. The frequency with which we talk to other persons face-to-face, that is in mutual physical presence, has most likely not increased - but it has probably also not dramatically declined during the past decades. If we have more opportunities to communicate than ever before, in the sense of conducting interactions based on the use of natural languages, then this increase is clearly a function of technical devices whose effects neutralize the consequences of physical and sometimes also of temporal distance. Some of us old ones feel that this is simply too much - and that, at the same time, it is not enough presence. If the process of Modernity has largely been a process of disenchantment, we have now written "Rational Re-enchantment" on our revolutionary banners. But I am fully aware that this is but another Gray Panthers' revolution.

Paul Frosh, Ph.D
Department of Communications and Journalism
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mount Scopus
Jerusalem 91905
Israel

msfrosh at mscc.huji.ac.