Currently I’m reading
Randi Zuckerberg’s book Dot Complicated:
Untangled Our Wired Lives (2013), she wrote about the digital world we’re
living now:
“What’s the upside? We’re
more connected.
And the downside? We’re
more connected.
Technology has altered every aspect of our lives, from
our relationships to our families to our careers to our love ones. It’s changed
how we celebrate birthdays, how we announce major life news, how we define
friendships, and how we demand costumer service.
With smartphones, and the cameras built into them,
friends and family can share all the most important moments in their lives with
one another as they happen. In June 2011, a Pew Research Center survey of over
two thousand American adults found that Facebook users have stronger ties with
their closest friends, find it easier to get support and advice from people,
and are more likely to stay in touch with ‘dormant ties,’ old friends from high
school or college, or people who live far away.
Grandparents can see the face of a newborn grandchild
from thousands of miles away through the lens of a webcam and via video
calling. In fact, research published in 2012 by Dr. Shelia Cotton at the
University of Alabama, Birmingham, showed that seniors who used the Internet
were about 30 percent less likely to be depressed than seniors who didn’t.
Colleagues can have virtual face-to-face meetings with
people working in offices anywhere in the world – there’s no such thing as a
remote office anyway.
Friends can capture every moment of a dinner party
through photos and make those photos beautiful with professional-looking edits,
filters, and borders.
That same ease of communication might also mean that you
get an informal Facebook message on your birthday, instead of a phone call;
that you might get an e-mail from the person sitting right next to you at work,
instead of an actual conversation; or that everybody at your dinner party might
be so busy taking photos and them look nice, that they’re no longer paying attention
to anybody else. We can miss important
moments if our heads are constantly buried in those phones…
The Internet allows, and encourages, information to
travel faster and farther than even before. That means positive information
travels quickly…. It also means negative information travels just as quickly… I
once overheard a major Hollywood film executive say, ‘Social media has ruined our ability to release bad movies. And we need
to be able to release bad movies to stay in business.’ It used to be the
case that a really bad movie could still have a great opening weekend, because
it would take word of mouth a few days to spread. But in the age of Facebook
and Twitter, a movie can be dead in the box office just hours after it opens.
But just because we have a megaphone doesn’t mean we need
to shout from it all the time. If we’re constantly crying ‘Wolf!’ nobody will take us seriously. As a society, we need to
accept the gift we’ve been given and realize that it comes with a set of
responsibilities. When used thoughtfully
and mindfully, we can expand access to knowledge and information, demolish old
barriers to understanding, and give a global voice to those who were once
voiceless.”
[Long excerpt from Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives
by Randi Zuckerberg (Harper-Collins Publishers, 2013), page 65-66, 68-69. Buy
this book!]
Let technology supposed to help us, not lord it over
us.
Let technology fill our lives with meaning, rather
than fear.
Let technology empowered us, rather than overwhelmed
us.
Let technology become tools of opportunity to glorify
God in everything,
rather than promote insecurity.
THINK BIG.
START SMALL. GO DEEP.
