Connected? Yes. Alienated? Yes

Interesting statistics and golden quotes I've gathered for the sermon I'm putting together to preach at Hope International University in a couple of weeks. The general subject is "How to Stay Connected."

The average user spends 20 minutes per visit on Facebook, and 23% of Facebook's users check their account five or more times every day.

There are an estimated 400 million smartphones across the globe, and one expert estimates that number will rise to 1 billion within a few years, because "more and more people are doing everything on their smartphones. Last year, for the first time, sales of smartphones and tablets surpassed those of laptop and desktop computers. Daily time spent on apps now exceeds time spent online on laptops and desktops.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently wrote, "The world has gone from connected to hyperconnected."

"The more we wed ourselves to social networking as a strategy for building community, the more we risk forgetting that the problems in our communities do not hinge upon lack of access to shared information about each other's lives.

"Americans in the 21st century devote more technology to staying connected than any society in history, yet somehow the devices fail us: Studies show that we feel increasingly alone. Our lives are spent in a tug-of-war between conflicting desires--we want to stay connected, and we want to be free. We lurch back and forth, reaching for both. . . . Our society is in the midst of a dramatic and progressive slide toward disconnection." --Utne Reader

Of 44,000 patients 45 or older living with heart disease or the risk of it over a four-year period, nearly 8% of those younger than 65 who lived alone died, compared to 5.7% of those who lived with others. Older individuals who said they felt "lonely" had a 45% higher risk of death than those who were not, according to a second study. 

"We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technologhy has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. . . . Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by er more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating congradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cu lde-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information."--Stephen Marche in the Atlantic.