Stories about new forms of communication and community – from  to email to  – seem to reach some kind of critical mass in the media this week. It began Sunday, in the Times magazine, with Peggy Orenstein fretting about les faux amis she was accumulating on Facebook, while grieving for today's teens who were being denied the right to a past by the phenomenon of portable community. “[S]omething is drowned in that virtual coffee cup,” she wrote, “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness.” (The fact that she admitted that she had left home as a teenager with Marlo Thomas's That Girl and Mary Tyler Moore's Mary Richards as role models only put a small dent in her argument. Aside from the fact that both were fictional characters, consider the hair.)
 

Then in Wednesday’s Times there was an alarming front page story about jury trials that ended in mistrial because of jurors who were doing freelance research on the case online -- and texting and Twittering their friends throughout. (A juror in a case involving a company called Stoam Holdings sent this text message to his friends: “oh and nobody buy Stoam. It's bad mojo and they'll probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter.”)
 
That same day WNYC’s Soundcheck devoted half its program to a Twitter battle between Lily Allen and Perez Hilton (come on, act like you care) with the guests, prompted by host John Schaefer, trying to stay on the topic of the importance of Twitter. And on Thursday, the NPR station’s Brian Lehrer played host to the authors of Love, Mom, a book about  mothers endless email relationships with their daughters.  (“Stay out of my chat room!” she cried, slamming the door.)
 
Usually by the time the media is obsessing over a story as old as instant electronic communications and Its Implications for Society, the issue is pretty much dead. People communicate anyway they can, and for many growing up, the faster the better. The argument takes pretty silly detours: one of Schaefer's guests actually compared those fretting about Twittering to those who objected to Elvis’s pelvis on the Ed Sullivan show, when the point was a) America did not get to see the man’s pelvis and b) the cat really knew how to shake that thing. To say that I don’t care what Perez Hilton thinks of Lily Allen -- or that David Gregory ate a muffin -- I would need to reinvent the concept of understatement. 
 
But is instant, endless communication bad? I like some silence in my life, and get plenty, even in NY, but when I do want to reach out, it’s nice to know that there is someone there. Yes, maybe there was great American art that was born of isolation and unconventionality (Faulkner, Pollock) but the by-product of that was sometimes alcoholism and madness (Faulkner, Pollock) -- so maybe there’s a trade off. But if you don’t care for the endless tsups and chatter, you can always turn the devices off, no?
 
Hit me back, girl.