Further to my previous post, Frank Viola had a guest post recently which talked about the illusory nature of online firendships and their impact on our ability to form relationships. The author of the post is Stephanie Bennett who has written a fair bit about this. Some of the points to come out of her piece are as follows:

• “Today’s mobile media foster a multi-tasking lifestyle that easily leads to a mentality comfortable with fitting people into packed schedules that rarely leave enough room for meaning conversation or quality time together.”
• “While our mobile media create a plethora of new opportunities that allow us to use language in many creative ways, they are also changing our perception and experience of the relationships we hold so dear.”
• “As we become more accustomed to giving partial attention to people, we lose the important focus necessary to truly connect and commune with them.”
• “Along with multi-tasking our relationships, several other unexpected challenges arise. As dependence upon our personal mobile media for friendship and fellowship becomes entrenched in everyday experience, one main challenge is in dealing with something we might call a hyper-knowing of others. This is that tendency to be much more open with those we don’t live with – sharing personal (and increasingly private) information about ourselves with those whom we have no primary responsibility or actual embodied experience. When this happens, people often feel they are closer to their distant online friends than they are to the people around them. The main problem here is that the online friendship is mostly illusional.”
• “Words are magnificent gifts given by God to help human beings make meaning, but words are not sufficient without action to back them up.  Too easily, words alone mask our real needs and motivations. The thing is – masks must be removed for intimacy to grow and it is life together that has the greatest potential to reveal who we really are and all that we can be.  Fellowship is face-to-face settings has much greater worth to accomplish the work of the transformation of our souls.”

And perhaps the quote that says it all:

• “These are no substitutes for truth and reality. Our Father thought human presence significant enough to send Jesus the Christ in the flesh. He could have sent a message in a bottle, but chose the incarnation instead.”

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The Age had a great article today on the way our digital culture is actually changing our brains. There has been alot written about this in recent years. The Atlantic had an article back in May about the fact that social media like Facebook and Twitter is making us lonelier while at the same time we have never been more connected. Here are some very insightful quotes from the Age article:

• ”There is a massive and unprecedented difference in how [digital natives’] brains are plastically engaged in life compared with those of average individuals from earlier generations and there is little question that the operational characteristics of the average modern brain substantially differ,”
• “Eye contact is a pivotal and sophisticated component of human interaction, as is subconscious monitoring of body language and, most powerful of all, physical contact, yet none of these experiences is available on social networking sites. It follows that if a young brain with the evolutionary mandate to adapt to the environment is establishing relationships through the medium of a screen, the skills essential for empathy may not be acquired as naturally as in the past.”
• “A recent study from Michigan University of 14,000 college students has reported a decline in empathy over the past 30 years, which was particularly marked over the past decade.”
• “A survey of 136 reports using 381 independent tests, and conducted on more than 130,000 participants, concluded that video games led to significant increases in desensitisation, physiological arousal, aggression and a decrease in prosocial behaviour.”
• “Can the internet improve cognitive skills and learning, as has been argued? The problem is that efficient information processing is not synonymous with knowledge or understanding. Even the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, has said: ”I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information – and, especially, of stressful information – is, in fact, affecting cognition.”

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