A World of Engagement

E-mail?  Love it.

Connecting with old friends on Facebook?  Amazing.

Research at your fingertips?  Unbeatable.

Providing information to the world about your product and/or services?  Cheap, effective and immediate.

A place to share ideas in a Areopagus-like setting?  Very cool.

The Internet has opened to me, and so many of you, a world that we only dreamed of twenty-five years ago.  In a word: engagement.  We are able to be connected in ways that are mind-boggling.

But I have sensed that my world has shrunk to fifteen inches of two-dimensional pseudo-reality.  I have become increasingly connected to the universe on my laptop, while become less and less engaged with the actual universe surrounding me.  I realize that many of those cyber-connections can enrich my life, but only in somewhat superficial ways.  The Sirens of the ancients are luring me to a rock-strewn shore.

The attraction of the screen is hypnotic.  It began with movie screens, drawing us into an alternate reality on Saturday mornings.  I can remember being dropped off with friends on Saturday mornings at the Mellett Mall cinema to see a movie, complete with a couple of cartoon shorts, for a quarter or fifty cents (I forget).  I escaped from long days in school and boring afternoons in the neighborhood.  The massive screen before me carried me around a dirt track with Herbie or soaring in a winged-car with Caractacus Potts and Truly Scrumptious.

Then televisions became the fascination (and still leave a majority of us semi-comatose for the evening hours at home).  Soon computers, then cell phones, palm pilots, iPods, Blackberrys, et al.  We have been sucked in by the sirens of technology - not by our ears, but our eyes.

The lure is unmistakable.  I have seen it in the strongest of us.  A spare moment suddenly becomes an opportunity for reflection, prayer, conversation, or service. . .  and we opt for a screen.  Texting, surfing, scanning, anything but engaging with the world in the same room.

I am guilty as so many of you are.

Do we dare say "No" to it all?  Fasting from the screaming screens?  Engage in the world around you today.  You won't simply avoid the onset of a repetitive motion injury, but you just might save yourself and those around you from isolation and irrelevance.

Your thoughts?