Why are people becoming less and less friendly? Why are we afraid to run into someone we know when we go somewhere? Why are we continually becoming more dissociative from each other? It seems that as time goes on and as we grow to love technology more and more, we grow further away from community.
Next time you go to a restaurant, just take a look at the people around you. Odds are the majority of them are on their phone or tablet. I am certainly guilty of it, but it has become a huge problem — all the way from kids only a few years old up to older adults. While teenagers may certainly be the main culprits, I've seen whole families sitting at a table looking down at their phones. I’ll go out to eat with a group of my friends and there are always two or three people on their phone the entire time. Next time you’re in an elevator with someone, I can bet you that they are probably going to look down at their phone to avoid having to talk.
Our growing reliance on technology to communicate with others is killing our society. We are disassociating from one another. We should yearn to see people we know and we should love any opportunity to be with people we know, yet we squander these blessings by withdrawing ourselves from community. We want to remain in our bubble of comfort and away from any interaction with others. Why have we become like this? We have placed value into technology instead of into people and building relationships. As a result, friends are becoming more distant from each other and we don’t know how operate unless we always have a phone with us.
I was reading an article the other day that compared two great American writers and their predictions about what the future of America looked like (these writers were from the 1940s.) One of the writers foresaw a society in which the things we hate destroy us. The other sees a society where the things we love destroy us. The one sees a society where the rulers of the land will take books and education from us. The other sees that there will be no need for the rulers to take these things as we will no longer use them nor place value into them. Ultimately, the one sees a society where we will have no choice to value the important things of life whereas the other sees a society where we will have every opportunity to value the important things in life but instead we will place our value into vain things. It seems as though our society is continually moving more and more towards the second author's vision of society.
For us to build community and grow relationships and be intentional about meeting new people, we must disconnect from the technological world. Phones and social media are certainly not bad things; I love tweeting and texting! But, we are putting too much reliance on them. If you can’t spend thirty minutes chatting with your friends without constantly being on your phone, then you definitely have a problem! We can never truly connect with others unless we first disconnect from our addiction to technology.
Next time you eat with family or friends, try to put the phone away until you get done. Interact with real people. I believe that if we begin to interact with the people around us as much as we can instead of gluing ourselves to a screen, we will build a strong, friendly community. We won’t have to worry about an awkward interaction with someone we see in public, but we will be eager to greet them and build community with them. It will have a reverse effect; the more we attach ourselves to the virtual world, the more we are entrapped into it — but if we attach ourselves to real world conversations and relationships, we will be ambitious to continue our relationship building. Let’s put technology down to pick each other up — as a result, we will learn to love others more, strengthen our friendships, and build a community that actually associates with each other.
