"[T]he current generation of email users is communicating much more often than recent generations and possibly more often than any previous generation since people huddled in caves with only conversation to pass the nights away."

Thanks, Pew Internet & American Life Project.  It's nice for the internet to get some good press once in a while.  "Networked individualism" sounds (and is) much better than the stark, cruel "internet addictions" people used to rail about. 

And those huge telecom carriers shouldn't be allowed to get in the way of the human need to communicate online.  They'll never come up with the innovations that we might enjoy using to communicate in ever-more-interesting ways.  A France Telecom executive said yesterday in Silicon Valley that calling the carriers "dinosaurs" was an insult to dinosaurs.  From Washington Internet Daily:

"The big telcos will lose" if history is a guide, [Norman] Lewis said: "We're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."These companies "are shackled by our business models. We are shackled by our legacy systems." They've been organized around the revenue and opportunities in a conventional voice business that produces enormous revenue, he said. "The immediate response" when threatened is "to hold on to what you've got." Fear of cannibalizing mobile business interferes with VoIP efforts, for instance, "so you have a certain amount of paralysis," he said.

It wouldn't be good for the economy or for our insatiable need to keep in touch for the telcos to be in charge of "the internet."