Tonight I spent an hour on the the computer visiting with my brother. I am grateful for the technology that allows me to see and hear my brother (and his wife and kids). We were able to joke and laugh almost as if I were sitting in the same room with him. I was talking to him about my daughter moving away to go to graduate school and about how it would be weird for me to be farther than an hour drive away from her. She will be a 14 hour drive or two hour flight away when she moves to Seattle near the end of summer. I wondered aloud to my brother how our mother coped with her girls all moving far away from home for school.
“Well back then there were no cell phones or instant messaging or video chatting or any of that stuff,” he reminded me. “You could maybe get a phone call once a week or a letter in the mail every now and then. Now you can send emails and texts instantly or talk or Skype every day.”
I realize how right he was. Technology is what allowed me to connect with him today and last week. There’s no reason I can’t talk to him “in person” like that all the time. Same with anyone else in my family. While some of my siblings are luddites when it comes to using technology (I used to think my other brother didn’t even know how to turn on a computer), we have means to connect whenever we want to.
I am also reminded about how fortunate we are to have access to the technology and that we can afford it. My laptop is six years old–ancient by some standards–and it acts a little funky at times, crashing and such. I lay my hands on it trying to will it to keep functioning properly. But the fact that I have a computer at all, and an iPod, “smart” phone, and all manner of technology is a blessing that many people do not have.
My son says that we are “cyborgs,” that we are so reliant on our technologies that we are in essence part machine and will someday be unable to function without them. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that we do so much with technology that we can find it slow and archaic and irritating if we have to do things the “old fashioned” way. Today I wrote out a birthday card and mailed it snail mail (with a stamp and everything) to my aunt in Nashville. She’ll get it late–the postal carrier didn’t pick it up until late afternoon and my aunt’s birthday is Monday–but she’ll have a physical thing that comes in her mailbox that she’ll get to open. My daughter sent me a letter via snail mail a few weeks ago. She said she wanted to surprise me, and it did. I must confess that every day I go to my mailbox wishing something “good” would come in the post, something besides “window” mail–bills and junk. It was good to receive a nice letter telling me that I am loved and appreciated and wishing me a good week. I hope my Aunt is as delighted to receive a card with a neatly typed letter inside. Technology is allowing us to do amazingly cool things like talk “face to face” with people thousands of miles away. But sometimes simple technology like an old fashioned letter in the mail is priceless.
I am grateful for the myriad variety of ways I can connect to people that I love. I text and play games with my daughter on our phones nearly every day. I Skype or “Facetime” with family and friends every week and talk on my cell phone to them constantly. When it comes right down to it, though, I’d really like a transporter system like they have in Star Trek, where I can beam myself over and greet my brother with a hug and kiss, and sit in his house and hag out or a few hours then beam myself back. Because in the end, there’s nothing quite like being there in person.
