To your point about interactions. Yes, I believe our in person interactions have changed, especially in the younger generations. Just observe college students interacting and see how long they can focus on the conversation without picking up a phone to text, email, check facebook or twitter, or some other form of digital interface. We are slowly losing our ability to focus on the moment and on each other.

I think this is indicative of an increasing appetite for an ego driven communication model. If the current conversation is not capturing my insatiable need for ego stimulation, I will go to a place that does. Usually that is our phone in public places. Unconsciously (or perhaps consciously) we are saying you are boring me.

I’m not sure I can adequately answer how people lived before the internet since my adult life has been much affected by it. However, I can say that I see an interpersonal generosity and a much more genuine ability to show interest in other people in the older generations than I do in people my own age or younger. Maybe I’m romanticizing, but it seems that the term salt of the earth is much more readily applied to my grandparents than to anyone I know in my social circle.

In any case, your questions are good ones, but I’m afraid I don’t have comprehensive answers. As this post is concerned with, I believe this aspect of the Internet as an integral and accepted part of minute by minute existence is such a young phenomenon that we don’t have a clear picture on the long-term implications. So rather than just speculate on the implications, I’m saying we should question why of all cultural changes, we have accepted this one so wholesale and with such little resistance in such a short amount of time. My gut says it’s because it is ego driven and not forced from the outside as many other cultural changes may have been. Consumerism has been making head roads like this into our lives since the dawn of the advertising age – but the Internet and social media are taking it to new levels.

I couldn’t resist. Great thoughts here. I especially like the idea of a measured engagement with online social resources. We need to understand what they are, what function they serve, and what they are replacing as it relates to the way people interact with their world. I can only give a personal reflection, but I don’t know anyone who has used online resources to enable them to become a hermit or recluse completely walled off from the world of face to face contact. Instead it seems that people use social media for a certain type of interaction. Perhaps a type of interaction that is happening less in the traditional social contexts or a that didn’t used to happen but now we have developed an appetite for. I’m curious which you think it is. Have our in-person interactions changed such that needs and wants of a consistent social appetite that used to be filled no longer are, or is our social appetite changing based on the new ego binge based on-line mechanisms? In a more reflective sense, how did people live without the internet? Finally, do you think the shift in behavior reflects legitimate personal needs, or an egoistic luxury? The question of need vs. luxury seems to me to have significant implications on how we as Christians ought to use/guard against social media.