Stay Connected

In a time when it has never been easier to keep in touch and stay connected to people in your life, are you? Consider this a challenge.

I have spent almost 5 hours logged into facebook tonight. I spent another hour in and out of gmail. I have chatted, emailed, wrote on walls, and commented on pictures. I have browsed the lists of other online facebookers, seeing who I could entice for an evening conversation. Besides doing laundry, going to look at an apartment, and eating a quick dinner, it's been a pretty boring night. But while I sat here, seemingly intertwined in the lives of hundreds of people I once knew, I began to realize how isolated social networking has made me. Has made us.

In sometimes desperately trying to maintain relationships with anyone that was, at one time, important in our lives, we have desensitized ourselves to the true meaning of connection.

We've substituted coffee shop conversations for chatting online. We've substituted phone callfs for texting. We've substituted drop-bys for emails. And in doing so, we have lost the essence of what it once meant to grow a bond between two people. I'm the first to admit, for much of high school, college, and probably up until right now, I always considered online communication my friend. I was able to be deliberate, thought out, structured, manicured, even strategic. But what I gained in electronic skills, I wasted in personal skills.

And with the means increasing, the portablenes of devices escalating, and the capability to 'always be connected,' I have lost something which should be valued like diamonds. I don't care how many pictures you see of me, how many friends I can link to, or how many times you've read my profile, it is almost impossible to keep up with an other's life unless you're in it. Not just as a name and a 200kb image. Which is why it was so important to me to make dinner plans with someone that I haven't seen in a long time. My news feed couldn't possibly be enough.

So that's where I challenge you. Don't be complacent with the expanding technology involved with online networking. Take a chance one day and go for a walk. Go buzz someone's apartment and hope their home. Give someone a call and meet at a coffee shop. There's a saying 'let your fingers do the walking.' Well stop letting your fingers do the talking too. Take what you think you have, and make it personal. It will make you a better person, and it will keep you close to people that may have otherwise faded into the technological abyss, this digital masquerade.