I spend too much time staring at a screen. It shows me pictures of the world, gives me information and glimpses into people’s lives, helps me communicate with far-away friends.
But it can’t recreate life. However connected I am via the Internet, there’s a totally different connection
Image courtesy of law_keven.
forget when I sit on my porch, washing my breath float into the frosty morning. Three fat blackbirds argue over the crumbs my children left in the driveway. The woodchuck who lives by the creek across the road waddles out, scrunching his nose and eyeballing me like a Beatrix Potter character. My neighbors pull out of driveways and wave as they pass.
There’s the older couple behind us; he keeps his tools in the trunks of two old cars parked in their backyard. There’s the single mom who’s having problems with her oldest daughter. There’s the lonely lady who lives next door and isn’t sure what to think of our boisterous comings and goings.
These aren’t people who will find me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter. I assume that the whole
Image courtesy of altemark.
world exists somewhere inside my laptop: I just have to find the access point. Maybe that’s true, but while I type and click far past the point of usefulness, I miss a walk in the park, a conversation in the driveway, a handshake through a car window.
Life is discussed, described, listed, commented, tracked, archived, and displayed online. But life happens out here. I don’t want to miss the real experience.
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Proverbs 27:10
Thine own friend, and thy father’s friend, forsake not; neither go into thy brother’s house in the day of thy calamity: for better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off.
Handshakes and smiles are still the best networking tool.
The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life. ~Andrew Brown
I calculated the total time that humans have waited for web pages to load. It cancels out all the productivity gains of the information age. Sometimes I think the web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society. ~Scott Adams
Images courtesy of l aw_keven and altemark. Quotes courtesy of QuoteGarden.