I was born in 1973. 28 years before I was born, World War II ended. Louisa was born in 2002. 27 years after the Vietnam War ended. WWII was in black and white. It was ancient history by the time I was 9. Vietnam was in color. They listened to Jimi Hendrix. Francis Ford Coppola made a movie and a kid got killed. It was not that long ago. Ancient history to my daughter.
When I was nine, my father started his own consulting business. He had a computer, a TRS-80 that we played a role playing game on. One day he brought it to my school and talked to all of the kids about computers. He wanted to make sure we were comfortable using technology. Louisa’s classmates are very likely able to argue the relative merits of Android and iOS operating systems with me. Some of them may play role playing games on their DSis.
Louisa does not have a Facebook page or an email account. She most definitely does not have a twitter handle. She will, however, have relationships online. That may be how she comes to know her cousins. That is already how she sees her grandfather. If she were allowed to date before 40, she have met a nice young man online. Or she might have met a nice young man, online. This may be no more remarkable than meeting a nice young man in church or at the grocery store. The legitimacy of relationships formed in the latter two places is not in question, but why the first? Our screens are no longer monochromatic.
I just read Graceful by Seth Godin, in which he, Seth Godin, says that relationships are cheapened online. I thought that pretty interesting considering the source. Having just spent a week experiencing some of the most honest connections I have ever felt face-to-face with a group of people who were complete strangers when we started, I came back with a similar sense of cheapening. I have a good many relationships I maintain online, and they have their interesting, thought-provoking and connecting qualities (likelihood you and I would be in conversation like this without this media?). However I very much believe that technology augments true relationship, and if we use it as a substitute, we will grow lonelier.
So I bought the book through Amazon and read it on my Kindle app. First time I have done that. It was a good experience, especially in its spontaneity. To be honest, I skimmed the second half of the book. It was hard to hang with Godin’s aphorisms when they did not seem counterbalanced by much humility. Still, I agreed with Godin on a lot of things, up to the point that he emphasized the scarcity of grace. It’s kind of odd to say that since this principle of scarcity underlies pretty much everything else. Still, I think that if our experience of grace is limited, that does not indicate a limitation in the supply. And if that is true, then we can’t be the indispensable linchpins of grace distribution. But we can be unique distributors. Each of us shares grace in a way that no one else can. If we view social media as a digital economy with a scarcity of grace, then it will ultimately fail as a means for achieving authentic relationships. But is grace is not scarce, and if we are unique agents of its propagation, then social media are a wonderful and powerful tools for furthering our reach.
Or maybe that’s the coffee talking.