The information
age, the age of technology, the digitized culture and the cyber culture
communities of our day have left many people, like me, in the wake of this big
ship that sails on the sea of the global society. There are so many ways to
electronically communicate today that we are inching closer and closer to not
even having to speak to one another at all.
I will admit that it has certainly helped us communicate quicker and
over longer distances almost immediately. Just like this simple blog here. When
I was in elementary school you had to get a newspaper or a magazine in order to
read stuff people had to say about everything. “Communication is the problem to
the answer” wrote the British Band 10CC in their song “The Things We Do For Love” which was released in 1976. How true
that line is for us today with the exception of what we do for love, but
rather, the things we do to keep from talking to people. Social skills that
were taught in the first grade have gone the way of the eight track tape
player. Conversational skills such as listening and cadence of speech do not
apply to tweets. If you can read you can communicate. Push a few keys, insert
some funny faces, a few consonants and vowels in upper case and boom . . . you
have sent a message. Facebook has replaced the grapevine. Gossip used to be
juicy because it had time to get ripe. You didn’t know it the moment it happened.
Now not only do you know at the very moment when someone falls off their
commode or their wagon, you can have a video of it; within seconds it spreads to
hundreds. The dirty laundry bin for families or friends has now been hung out
to dry in cyberspace. Is it any wonder people do not like to talk anymore? They
have no need to. People used to gather on front porches or at country stores
and even at church, to fellowship and talk with each other. Local post office
lobbies were the chat rooms. Now, and I’m guilty as well, we text someone in
the next room to keep from having to holler for them or actually walk up the
steps from the basement to tell them something.
Say what you will and think
what you want but conversation face to face is becoming a lost art. I guess
that is why people don’t come to church like they used to. They don’t have to
face the preachers when they preach the Word. They can read it online, like in
a blog, and read the parts they like. They don’t have to hear what they don’t
want to hear. It may offend them or depress them. There is one good thing about
not communicating face to face; it teaches us how prayer works!
