Hey Good Looking,
I hope your week is going well, and you’re kicking bootie out there!!
My Summer hiatus/vacation/spending time with my younger brother is still going strong, so I apologize for not writing in a while. I had some thoughts tonight, and wanted to share them with you.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my brother’s house in Limestone County TX, 85 or so miles from Dallas, when my phone pinged. My favorite reporter Jason Whitely was at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas, and something had gone wrong. There was an active shooter. Before the next dawn broke, five officers would be dead, and my safe “too close to home” world was shattered.
As on 9-11, the biggest thing I wanted was information. On the officers condition, on the shooter, on his motives, on what I could do to help. I remember clearly switching radio stations that Fall day, trying to find someone with information.
But now a days we have all the technology at our fingertips. By picking up a smart phone, we are connected to Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and a host of other news websites. My brother didn’t get the Dallas news channels on his TV, so I followed along with the story, almost exclusively from the Twitter accounts of my favorite reporter and my favorite news station WFAA.
And there in lies the problem. We have all of the information literally in our hand. We can sit on the couch and learn the world news, the scores to any baseball game, or the weather for the next 10 days. We can make plans for dinner, find a new recipe, talk to a celebrity, mock the opposition’s candidate. All while sipping a Diet Coke. We barely have to get out of our living room to live.
Which makes me question, is it all too much? Our grandparents, our parents, even some of us had to go to the library to do research, look in the paper for our news, or even just to the kitchen to look up a recipe.
Has too much information left us lazy or more connected? Has our ability to automatically see where our neighbors have gone on vacation, stopped us from actually asking them about their travels?
When is too much online living too much?
Just wondering. Save me a cold Diet Coke friend, and keep on rolling!!
Helen
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