The Internet: communication enhancer or silencer?

I suppose this post stems from one conversation with my wife that went like this:

     Jill: Are those pionees or not?
     Josh: We could just ask
     Jill: Why?  We'll just use the internet...

As much of the world is using the Net, people are less and less inclined to talk to each other.  Isn't it ironic that originally the World Wide Web was created to be able to communicate more easily, more quickly, and with less opposition with others all around the globe, and now, thirty some-odd years later, with more information at our fingertips, there is less need, less reason, less necessity in speaking with another human being!?!?  Given the choice to, for example, adjust your personal finances by yourself or talk to the financial institution holding your interests, I would venture to guess that 80% of the people  asked would rather just do it themselves.  That is, without talking to any other human being.

Ok, maybe that estimation is too high...  After all, there are still people of an older generation that would absolutely not want to do things themselves!  Maybe...

The thing is, anybody from a younger generation already think that the world is too slow and think that if they could only do it themselves, things would get done more efficiently, more timely, and more stylishly...  After all, nobody knows the fashion or the mode like 'them youngins'!

So, is it that we're just all too self-sufficient or could it be that we are simply impatient?  For example, my aforementioned dialogue with Jill, was it just that we would have to stop the car, get out of the car, walk over to the house, knock on the door, wait for an answer (at a house that may be empty and may very well be empty each and every time I stop to ask....) or is it that I know where to get online and where to go to look-up images of pionees (and, by the way, I have looked them-up now, as I've created this blog, and the flowers we were wondering about, are, in fact, pionees).  So, does that answer my original question of whether or not the Net keeps us from talking, or is it just a fact that it may or most likely would have taken weeks, maybe months, or I may never found-out the answer to my wife's question, but I could solve that problem with a few keystrokes (and if I had Siri, I could have simply asked her/it for the images) and without having to bother anyone!

As I typed "bother," I realized that this was at the root of her objection: Don't go and bother those people when we can find-out ourselves without having to take-up anyones' time or energy or patience.  I guess, the point of saying, "we can use the internet was to not bother people..."

What is funny, is that when I came home and said that I had looked up the images on the Internet of pionees to see if that was the same flower we had seen in our neighborhood, she had talked to a neighbor and a friend and knew that what she had suspected, was correct--the flowers we had seen were, in fact, pionees and she was right.  So, I ended-up looking up the flower on the Internet, as she had suggested, and she did just what I had suggested and asked a neighbor.

Funny!

The whole situation drug-up the question of wether or not people talk less because of the internet.  If we were to use my situation as the only data that we look-at to judge whether or not the Internet silences face-to-face dialogues, the answer would be: No.  Most people, though, may find that if they don't have to talk to a person, they choose not to.  I know I am contradicting my own results to my question, but that's what my intuitive but maybe overly cynical and critical "gut" is telling me (or is that simply a philosophically trained and questioning?)!

JPS