Victim of Technology!

Have you heard this phrase? Do you have an intimate understanding of it? I didn't think I did until recently. It dawned on me last night while trying to go sleep. You know

that moment (or in my case roughly 2 hours) just before falling asleep when your mind wanders down different thought-paths working out the day's events, the plans for tomorrow & beyond, and reasoning out ludicrous what-ifs? Yeah, during that mind-wandering pre-sleep moment it dawned me that I am the epitome of a technology victim!

How? You may have read over at A Lil' Welsh Rarebit that Christy and I are planning a trip to NYC. Well, actually, Christy is planning our trip for us. I have to be honest I've been so distracted with the kids starting daycare for the first time ever, my Dad having heart surgery and me starting a new job that Christy has been planning our trip to NYC with a bit of opinion injected from me from time to time (now that is a good friend, right?! I mean Christy, not me!)

Here we are planning this huge trip to NYC and haven't spoken on the phone for over a year! Even now in the midst of our planning we haven't spoken on the phone! Yeah...email exchanges have happened and comments on one another's blogs too...but isn't that more to the point?

Technology victim!

Actually, we have NEVER spoken on the phone! Seriously. Christy and I have known each other since we worked together I think over five years ago. We use to have a small-ish girl group that got together every now and then for drinks or dinner until the group slowly disbanded. I went to a party here and there hosted by Christy and I went to her baby shower while she was pregnant with Ms. Foo. Christy came to a couple of my art shows. These few events have happened over the past five-some-odd years and always with an emailed or post-mailed invitation. In all this time, over all these events not once have we spoken on the phone. The last time I saw Christy or spoke to her was at her baby shower! That was Ms. Foo's baby shower and now Ms. Foo is a little over a year old!

Technology victims, we commune on Facebook and email, but rarely in person or on the phone. But maybe the word victim is not accurate here; because it's thanks to blogging, Facebook and email that I've been able to keep in touch with friends like Christy who have moved away or that I no longer work with and see on a daily basis. I've managed to keep a casual at-arms-length contact with my ex-bosses and coworkers thanks to these social networking tools. It's kind of cool to hop over to my ex-coworkers blog and see what she's been up to. I think you have to have had some fondness for the person in the first place to have any curiosity about their lives. My husband can't quite understand blogging about our lives and he really gets rolling with comments about Facebook statuses. I think they're perfect "just keeping in touch" type tools. I mean could you seriously see yourself calling up an ex-coworker from a year ago that you use to have lunch with on every Wednesday and Friday and saying in Facebook status lingo: "Jennifer is sitting outside watching the blue sky and sipping mojitos." saying nothing else and then hanging up? Or how about just randomly snail-mailing photos from your recent awesome vacation to Paris?! I choose Paris for my example because I've never been and would love to go. Can you imagine opening that envelope of photos from someone you haven't seen in a year and barely had a close relationship with in first place? These old forms of communication don't seem to offer the same opportunities the social networking tools offer. These tools have a very odd dynamic but they're definitely a dynamic that works.

So, if we're not technology victims then I guess we're ... what? ... technologically enhanced? That sounds like a robot...but you know what I mean!

*The image in this post was taken from Media Bistro.