When I was growing up, I spent every summer with my grandmother in a Virginia summer cottage. The nearest town was about a 20 minute drive away, but we did have a mailbox and a "party line" phone. The phone worked, but it was expensive to call long distance and this was way before answering machines and cell phones. It wasn't like we were ever bored. We had the Rappahannock River to play in, kids our age to play with, we went swimming, fishing, and caught crabs in crab traps. For a few years, I even had a small boat to travel around the river in. The only TV was black & white with only 2 channels on a clear day, and if it was from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm, the TV was monopolized by my grandmother watching the Price is Right and all the soap operas. This was a time period when we played outside creating our own entertainment or read a book on rainy days. Now this was in the early 1980's and computers were barely starting to make it's was into the home. Communication between home computers was not heard of. How did we stay in contact with everyone we knew? My cousin's and I would wait patiently everyday for the mailman to come deliver the mail. We knew the sound of the truck on the dirt road and would get excited with the thought a letter coming for us. The point of the mail delivery was contact from others outside of our immediate world. I had a few pen pals, and would read their letters with delight and then hurry to write a letter back to them so it would get in the next day's outgoing mail. I suppose when this is all you have to communicate with, you utilized to your best. In those pen pal letters, we shared tons of information about what our days were like and how we felt about life. We asked questions that needed further discussion and we took our time to make sure the ideas flowed evenly.
Now back to the modern world. I would be surprised if an hour doesn't go by that I don't check my iPhone for new messages and emails. Facebook is my homepage on my desktop and I have over 1200 "friends" on there. What troubles me is the depth of the conversations I have with my actual friends now. Sometimes I get a "like" and sometimes I get a few words in comments. It's a great convenience for someone like me living 1000 miles from family and close friends to stay in some form of connection with them and keep up with each others lives. It has enabled me to connect with some people I had lost contact with in previous years. It's almost as if you're not on Facebook, then you don't exist, and if you do exist on there, is that really you. Some people I know fairly well, but the persona the portray is not the same as I know them. I suppose you have to take the good and the bad with it. On one hand, the convenience is nice, but on the other depth and meaning is lost.
