Shut Down/Restart
A colleague--who proclaims himself a technophobe while maintaining a personal website and e-business portal--has posted a sign outside his office: "Shut down your computer. Restart a friendship."It's a catchy saying, and an attitude I credit to his curmudgeonly ways and steady progress toward retirement.
But both the saying and the attitude fail to recognize how meaningful Web connections have become to millions of folk, especially in my generation and younger.
I have started or restarted (and maintained) dozens of relationships on the Web that would never have survived the rat-race of daily life. IMing is a primary way that I keep up with one of my oldest friends. My wife and I e-mail several times a day. I've invited to someone to dinner at my house because of our Web interactions.
Online friendships, especially of the spiritual sort, are something the divinity school and church would be wise to reflect on. These sorts of relational models are only going to grow in the future.
The "silver tsunami"--an on-coming wave of wired Baby Boomers--predicted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2001 continues to grow in momentum.
While only 22 percent of Americans aged 65 and older currently use the Internet, the Pew project reported last month, that number jumped 47 percent between 2000 and 2004.
And "once seniors get online," the report says, "they are just as enthusiastic as younger users."
Because Internet users aged 50-58 behave more like younger users than like those 65 and older, as "Internet users in their 50s get older and retire, they are unlikely to give up their wired ways and therefore will transform the wired senior stereotype," the report concludes.
That means we can expect human friendship--as well as human behavior and concepts of the self, both subjects dear to the discipline of pastoral theology--to be continually shaped by the presence of the Web.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, April 13, 2004
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