From our February 3 edition
THE world is a big place that seems to be growing smaller.
It never ceases to amaze me how I can sit at my computer and talk with an adopted son in Zurich at the same time as catching up with my aunt in Australia and friends in the States while posting pictures so that my sister in Portobello can get her fix of beautiful Sutherland.
I can keep up with what the nephews are up to in the Netherlands and get the news from friends in all sorts of places from Embo to Embra and the Emirates almost as soon as it happens.
Technology is a wonderful thing. I don't understand how it works, but I appreciate it and enjoy its benefits – although I worry about the computer screen becoming a substitute for the real thing. Technology carries its dangers.
I worry about youngsters who are constantly texting one set of "friends" while they are with another. I worry about them then going home after school to sit in their bedrooms talking to their friends via a social networking site instead of going out to meet them.
"It's good to talk" was the slogan years ago for one of our telephone companies and it very definitely is good to talk. It is even better, however, when you can talk, not just face to face via a computer screen, but when you can see and actually reach out and touch the other.
Friendship has to be about more than simply talking heads. Are friends not for sharing music, laughter, adventures and experiences with as well as conversations? Are friends not for simply sitting down with and perhaps saying nothing at all?
In the closeted teenage bedrooms of today we run the danger of growing a generation of youngsters who have forgotten how to meet people face to face.
We run the danger of growing a generation who, because of the technology that is second nature to them, may well become more socially isolated, and not less, as the worldwide web draws them in and real life, with all its challenges and possibilities, passes them by.
Am I sounding like an old curmudgeon? I really don't mean to. Honest!
I just know from personal experience how good it is to be able to lay a hand on someone else's arm when there are no words to speak. I know, too, how much I have benefited from the physical company of others in good times and in bad. There is nothing at all that can beat someone just being there for you.
I know the value of real friendship and I don't want anyone else having to make do with second best.
It's good to keep in touch: physically as well as virtually.
