I wish I could express the beauty I see and the hope I hold. I once told someone my love for humanity is the reason I am alive, and what I meant by that is life isn't worth living unless you have something worth living for, and I would quickly say this is my love of my family and friends. And yet here I sit in front of a metal and plastic device, artificially conveying a digitized means of communication that is completely devoid of actual emotion or humanity, save what one can discern from these words. And if I do not count the several people I talked to on the phone today, or the clerk at the grocery store, the only face to face interpersonal relations I had today were between my Roommate and one of my professors.

Under normal conditions, such as my previous semester at school, or if I was living where I grew up, my encounters and interactions would be much different. I will say that my current situation I exist in is representative in terms of it being an outlier, not representational of a normal day, week, or month. But regardless it speaks volumes about how some of us live, as a greater degree of my contact is through the realms of social networking or online communication. I do not see our new degree of interconnectedness and ability to communicate as a positive thing. I believe our contact is watered down through impersonal implementations that remove the humanity from talk. One can have enjoyable, engaging conversations on the phone, and the barrier produced by the plastic wireless device isn't the worst. However the ease at which we can IM, facebook, myspace, or blog our lives away with people we'd normally make efforts to see in person, waters down normal contact in favor of abnormal means to placate our desire for social interaction.

We live in a fast-food era of communication, in which services like Twitter, Facebook, and our constant interconnectedness report the mundane

they don't give you time to actually think of something worth saying or talking about, you are constantly bombarded with the pointless and useless information.


Now the tables have turned on who screws who with social networking!