It’s ironic that someone who spends their working hours using the Internet to help young people get through tough times should find himself sometimes wishing the Internet didn’t exist – but that’s the space I find myself in just now. And as for Facebook, well don’t get me started.
You see at the end of January our family moved to San Francisco for me to head up the Inspire USA Foundation. Inspire’s mission is to help millions of young people lead happier lives and we’ve been operating in Australia since 1997 and started in the US in 2007 and Ireland 2008.
Moving overseas is always a big deal – at least my wife and I have done that before (Thailand in the late 80s) and she many times before that as well – but it’s an even bigger deal for the kids. Ours are Lucy 15 years old and Jamie 10. Jamie is not on Facebook but Lucy is and therein lies my gripe - because of her strong friendships in Australia she is conversing with her friends "back home" every single day and night. What this means is that she will fall back to those relationships were she feels comfortable and invest less in establishing new ones here in the Bay Area in her new home. Now I know we’ve only been here six weeks and yes, maybe I should wait a little longer with Lucy but I’m concerned about the Net’s tendency to work against “being here now”.
Related to this I was staying in DC last week with my good friend Rev Dave McAllister-Wilson who heads up the Wesley Theological Seminary and we were talking about the high incidence of PTSD and the possible reasons behind this. Dave had been conversing with one of the senior chaplains in the US military who said that the incidences of PTSD are far, far higher than they ever were for WW2, the Korean War and even the Vietnam war. So we got to wondering whether the Net (or more accurately modern day communications) might be a contributing factor. An example was given of a young soldier who is on duty in Iraq where missiles are showering down and he’s on the phone to his wife in Wyoming talking about their renovations. As with my daughter Lucy, thanks to technology, this young soldier is striving to exist in two places at the same time but, in his case, far more different and difficult places and presumably leading to even greater stress than might otherwise be the case. Can our connectedness actually increase our discontent?
I was told last year by a relative of a drone pilot that they much higher rates of PTSD than normal pilots – it’s a variation on the above in that they go into the office, fly the drone planes and then head home to have dinner with their families. All a bit to surreal for me.
So how do we stay grounded rather than just connected in today’s inter-connected world? How can we be here now in the age of facebook? Hopefully we’ll find some answers at the Wisdom 2.0 Summit being held here in the Bay Area at the end of April. See: http://www.wisdom2summit.com/home
