 |
| Photo credit: Me |
I just read The Men Who United the States by Simon Winchester. The book covers the history of the United States and how we went from a few scattered colonies that relied on hand carried mail to communicate with each other to a continent spanning nation full of people with phones in their pockets that wirelessly connect them to all manner of people nearly instantaneously.
As you read the book, you are lead through an America slow knitting itself together through exploration of unknown lands, modification of rivers, and building of roads and rails. Cables were hung for telegraphs and then electricity and then phones. Airplanes crisscrossed the skies. Then the internet and then the internet cut free of cables. And now we are free to drive at seventy miles an hour (when traffic allows) across tarmacked roads or board magical sky tubes to whisk us effortlessly over rivers and swamps and mountains that our ancestors toiled to cross. Even easier, we can pull out our phones and see the faces of friends and family thousands of miles away in an instant. Truly, we are a nation connected.
Except that the promise of that connection, that optimism that served as an undercurrent to help carry forward all those great people doing great things to make America great, has soured. We find ourselves able to talk to and chat with a nearly endless number of people. But we feel more isolated and alone then ever.
I had a work trip in Hawaii a few months ago. Using the wonders of modern technology, I was able to livestream service from my church while I sat on a rock and watched the sun rise and the waves slap the beach and surfers ride those waves. I was hearing the same words at roughly the same time as my friends back home were. I was, in a sense, connected to them. But I did not experience connection. I was alone on a rock far from home, and my heart knew it. The service ended, the stream stopped, and I was on that rock while they were in the sanctuary.
The internet, much like roads and canals and cars and planes, is a tool. We looked to it for unification, but we should not have. It facilitates commerce and communication. But it cannot truly provide connection. It feels like it should be able to, but it fails somehow to knit people together in the way that sitting around a table together can or working together can. I do not understand what is missing, but my soul feels it.
If America is truly going to become united in spirit as well as name, it will not be the work of the internet that does it. Unity needs to come from actual connection, from actual understanding, from conversation and empathy, not from sound bites, hashtags, and emojis. The internet if a fantastic tool, but it is just a tool. My hope is that we learn how best to use it wisely.
End note: The book is fantastic. You should go read it. Also, I do most of my reading now via audio books. It’s amazing how many books you can read while walking the dog or doing dishes.
Comments