Lets Be Friends

It’s not any of my business, but I’d like to know what you’re thinking. Leonard Sweet describes cocooning as the process of turning more and more inward as a result of the technology that is available to us today. I don’t need to get out and about as much when I can correspond, play games, order food and perform any number of other daily tasks right from my computer. The television started it. The latest news, sports and entertainment come right into our living rooms and, again, the technology has created a dizzying number of ways to do that. In spite of all this “progress”, however, we seem to know less about one another than we did when we personally interacted. I’ve never believed that the genie can be put back into the bottle, so trying to go back to a time before, say, television is futile. The forward looking challenge is to utilize the available technology to stimulate (dare I say, incite?) greater interaction that may have the potential for an even higher level of intimacy. We are still free to choose how we do our cocooning, and that may be the positive side of things like Twitter and Facebook that I’m only now beginning to experiment with. Our time together is finite. That, in and of itself, ought to lend a sense of urgency to learning as much about one another as we can.

PS Now everything's okay: Sniper John Allen Muhammad is executed