GPS-enabled navigation devices benefit from “high-tech Rosetta Stone” technology as they leapfrog past early adopter growth and surge almost directly into widespread, mainstream usage.

How does one bring about social change?

Is it by protesting, lobbying, marching, or something else? In many cases, the best way to create change in any environment is by leaving it. Much like the mass migration of the Swedes in the early nineteenth century, only when mass groups of people migrate away from negative situations does the situation itself improve.

So, where are the disgruntled people of the modern world heading?

Alexander Graham Bell would be surprised to see pedestrian traffic walking and talking on their cell phones. When Bell invented the telephone, it was to enable people to speak to each other when face-to-face communication was not possible. Bell would be amazed at the growth in “important” messages that people now convey to each other. He did not imagine that the telephone would become a social instrument that displaces personal contact between people. Bell would be surprised that boredom, isolation, and loneliness could drive people to choose electronic over face to face conversation. Moreover, Bell never would have imagined the sheer volume of talk that the cell phone has generated, that there are now people in our society who are doing more talking on their cell phone than they are in face-to-face conversation.

It’s no secret (HINT: the smell of $$$) why so many Fortune 500 companies – IBM, Dell, GM, Motorola, Toyota, and dozens of others – are rushing to participate in Second Life (SL), the increasingly popular online virtual reality game that lets people do whatever they want to do, be whoever they want to be, and sell whatever they want to sell. The knottier mystery is why millions of people are coughing up $10 a month to spend up to fifty hours a week playing a game that gives them the opportunity to spend even more money on things that aren’t real.