I think all writers should confess their biases. I am an unashamed Luddite. They were a group of anti-technology folks in 19th century England who actually destroyed mechanized looms because they were taking weaving jobs from the skilled and giving them to the unskilled (Wikipedia).
I think we’re all weaving a tangled web with some of the technological devices that are supposed to help us connect. In reality I think they’re doing the opposite.
[Does anyone smell a sequel from last week?]
People who use social networks like Facebook or Linkedin are 30% less likely to know their neighbors and 26 % less likely to provide them companionship. Two years ago, a General Social Survey hypothesized that the average American was feeling more socially isolated because of the rise of the Internet and cellphones. That study found that from 1985 to 2004, the number of intimate friendships people reported dropped from three to two. [“Does Technology Reduce Social Isolation?” Business, Innovation, Technology, Society—BITS from NYTimes online By Stefanie Olsen 12/5/2009]
According to a recent Kaiser/New York Times study (2,000 kids 8 – 18 years old) if your teenager is awake and isn’t in school, he or she is staring at a screen, a smart-phone, a computer, or watching television. That means 7.5 hours a day attached to an electronic umbilical cord. Other “electronic drugs” weren’t included in the study, making it closer to 9.5 hours a day if you include them. That doesn’t even count the time spent talking on those gadgets to real people, albeit, real people not with them, another 1.5 hours.
Who’s talking to the people they are with, like their parents or their friends cooling their heels waiting for them to finish their “electronic evasion”?
Fueling all this is a dread of being bored, according to the survey. There’s this fear of being alone with your thoughts or having unprogrammed time. Are the incessant leagues, lessons and sports schedules we keep our kids on partially to blame?
Neuroscientists tell us that our most fertile ideas foment from those times when our mind is relaxed and not focused on anything in particular. Inventions that come to people in dreams demonstrates this. Yet those are people who’ve spent hours beforehand actively pursuing the solution to some problem via research and experimentation. (http://www.breakpoint.org/commentaries/14307-the-courage-to-be-bored)
In other words some of the greatest thinking, creating and productivity has come from a combination of relaxation and work, not overdosing on electronics.
We adults must show there is another way. How are we doing? Not much better, according to the statistics just on our TV habits. These reveal we average around 4 hours per day. Clearly the stats show this contributes directly to the outbreak of obesity for young and old, a separate significant social problem.
The answer partially lies in real relationships (“realationships”), not ones based on electronics: connecting based on heart-felt conversations versus hard-wired connectivity.
I’m so glad that’s the example Jesus gave us when the Gospel writer told how He came to dwell among us. He didn’t send an email or skirt a real realationship by Skyping us:
“The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. We have seen his glory, the glory o f the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).
