Anthony's Musings on Face to Face and Facebook

In the past couple of years I have had the delight to make contact with many new friends who are distantly and not so distantly related to us. Just the other day we ran into a cousin I had not seen in at least a dozen years, and we connected via email. We now have contact with a first cousin Earnie had never met till now. Email and the net, again, made this possible. The Facebook friends connections are growing and I have had several occasions where an update on their site registered with me and I find the issues arising at prayer time. One of my best friends just started a substantial blog of his own and I am excited about reading his thoughts there.

All in all the social networking phenomenon has begun to touch our lives in a bigger way, and there is no turning back, I think. Not to say that the face-to-face contact it can lead to is replaceable. Some of the greatest memories IN recent memory have come from cousins who drop by to visit or renewed acquaintances when we drop in to see my grandmother. It's become a both/and world as we get most of our news from the net these days and I am looking into how I can replace cable with Netflix and streaming video.

Wonder what things will be like in my lifetime? I sometimes wonder if the ratio of continuity to change we experience will surpass that which my mother in law saw in her 97 years on earth?

I also hope to have some time to write a bit on the sacredness of place and how that translates to a virtual world...