Electronic Communications

On Saturday I was staying in a hotel room with my family, in Rapid City. It was a quick trip, and I forgot to take a book, which is my traveling habit.

I did, however, take my Ipod, which has become my traveling habit, substituting, for the most part, for the radio.

While there, there was a moment when I found that both my son and I were on our Ipods, I actually took a photograph of him on his with mine, and it struck me how dependent we've become on modern electronics. During the time I was there, I checked email to check on a relative in the hospital, I found that an old friend had "friended" me on Facebook, and I accepted, I actually took a photograph from the hotel and posted it on Facebook, with my Ipod, and I checked for the local Mass times for Saturday and Sunday masses in Rapid City. I also checked Google Maps for various things while there.

Recently, while in Tulsa for business, I used Facetime on my Ipod to connect with my daughter's Ipod and visit with my family. It's free, as long as you have a WiFi connection, and while the video quality isn't good, the audio is, and you can see your family.

I started to think about this, and the dependency we have developed on this in short order. It's temping to bemoan it, and indeed there is a lot to bemoan about how technological and electronic we have become. On the other hand, however, I'm not so sure that in some ways all of this doesn't take us back a bit to one of the more warmly remembered aspects of our past, which is who people were in close association all the time. To a degree, this lets us do that, although the element of distance and separation is still there. Still, at any rate, for the traveler, things aren't as lonely as they used to be.