That being said, I have to ask a question I posed a number of years ago when I started with this "blog" thing. Is technology benefiting us? Are relationships being developed? Are people really connecting? Are deep and meaningful interactions possible with these mediums?
I ask this because it seems that if you are not up to the latest, greatest craze in the electronic world, you are assumed to have something wrong with you. If you are not texting instead of calling, if you are not twittering instead of e-mailing, if you are not posting your latest thoughts on Facebook, Linked-in, or some other site, you are "out of touch".
We are constantly being barraged with possible ways to simplify our lives and our interactions with others. However, I am not certain that simplicity is what we should be looking for when it comes to things that really matter. And I am confident that without doing the work to establish real relationships, deep friendships, eventually we will find ourselves connected to thousands of people with no one really knowing us.
The deepest longings of man are to know and be known. I want to know others, I want to be known by others. The scariest things in life are when I take the risk to get to know others and exposing myself to them to be more fully known to them. If this is done in the safety of anonymity, then the risk is taken away. Without the risk, there is no reward. I cannot truly be know anonymously, and I cannot truly know others anonymously.
I am not saying that these networking sites do not have their place, but I will ask that we wrestle with how much time and energy we are going to spend on them. Sit down with someone across the table and talk. Have a conversation with a group of people on a couch in the living room. Face to face. If you find this difficult to do, if you find yourself wanting to "hide behind" your phone or your computer, maybe it's time to lay those things down and build some real "social networks".
Just a thought.
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