Too Connected?

I'm not a Unabomber type Luddite or anything, and I love my gadgets as much as the next person, but there are times when I think that we're all just a little too connected.

People used to say that blogs were the ultimate in arrogance; you really think that people want to read the minutiae of your daily life?!??! But, in fact, some people DO want to read the minutiae of our daily lives. Or, conversely, maybe some people just have really interesting (spoken like Bugs Bunny when dressing the Monsters hair) lives.

From blogs came the "here I am, here I am, here I am" world of Twitter. My kids told me the other day that their Dad follows Barak Obama on Twitter; my immediate (and unthinking) response was, "I don't want that much detail about ANYONE!!!" Seriously, Twitter freaks me out. I don't want that level of connectivity. I don't even want to know what my kids are doing every minute of every day; doing so would mean a serious loss of identity for me, and loss of privacy for them.

So, though I love them, I have my reservations about all these gadgets that make it so easy for us to constantly "get" to anyone, and most of my reservations revolve around "the younger generation" (Good God, I HAVE turned into an old fogey if I've seriously used that phrase).

I have no problem with the near-constant texting and IMing that college and younger kids seem to engage in, provided there are limits (not during Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma's would be a start!). But I do think that the young adults out there who have grown up in this ultra-connected world are missing something.

There's value in planning a conversation with a friend. There's a benefit in face-to-face communications that can't be found in the instant gratification of text messaging. If I take a photo on vacation, put it in an album and show it to a friend the next time she visits, it's true that she didn't experience the moment with me. But, she knows that our friendship is important enough to me to think of her, not just in the immediate moment, but afterwards as well. That's something that a phone-photo and a text message simply can't convey.

I also worry that my kids' generation, and probably the one just above them, actually think that texting IS communicating. There are many news stories out today about a shooting at Northern Illinois University. In one of them, it refers to students keeping their cell phones close to talk to parents and friends, but how they don't always bring relief; a student being interviewed tells how he just received a text message letting him know that a friend had died.

Excuse me? A text message informing someone of a friend's death?? This just isn't right. Now, yes, grief is grief, and the mode of communcation doesn't change the fact that a young man is dead. But a text message is not only impersonal, it's abbreviated. There's no room for compassion, emotion (and do NOT try to tell me that an emoticon is appropriate here), sharing. With a phone call, you at least get to hear the other person's voice, even if they're all choked up. With a letter, there's time and space to at least try to say all that you want to. Good Lord, even the Army sends real-live people to tell families of soldiers deaths. Humans have a need to connect with other humans during tragedies, and I just don't think a text message cuts it.

So, what will happen? Is my kids' generation going to go further down this path? We (the parents) seem to be learning a lot of How-Not-To's from watching the current college kids (don't hover, let your child make mistakes, germs are sometimes good, if you always tell your kid they're great it sounds empty...); are we going to leap into this arena as well, and teach our children how to connect with someone face to face?

Or am I just a dinosaur? :-)