Last week I stumbled upon (not StumbleUpon) an interesting article that emphasizes something I’ve been saying for a few years now. In short, the article highlighted a recent study detailed in the October issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which found that the number of friends and wall posts that a person had on their Facebook correlated with how narcissistic they were. Hmm…So you’re saying that if a person has “glamour” pictures of him or herself as their profile picture, he or she has a good chance of being a narcissist? Absolutely mind blowing!

We hardly ever get to know the “real” person on the other side of that profile pic or page, the other end of the email, text or Tweet. Companies, such as Google, have turned us into a culture of “I want the information NOW; and only the info that I want – nothing else.” Nicholas Carr outlines in his book, “The Big Switch,” how a new computer revolution is reshaping business, society and culture. Not that I completely agree with everything he forecasts in his book, but he did bring up some interesting and valid points in last week’s interview with one of my favorite people, Stephen Colbert, regarding the book. In the interview, Carr talked about how we jump around so much on the Internet, grabbing bits of info, and then jumping to the next thing, causing us to take that into our communications with others, etc. Shrinking attention spans and the loss of the ability to listen are just a couple of the Internet’s byproducts. This is why we never really get to know other people, and instead of having deep meaningful relationships with one or two handfuls of people, we have shallow, distant relationships with many, even thousands, of people.

Don’t get me wrong, technology, the Internet, even Google, are all wonderful and very vital to what we do here at BLAST, and in my everyday life. Well, without any of those, you wouldn’t even be reading this post right now (thank goodness for Al Gore!)! Technology has brought us together, but at the same time, pushed us farther apart from one another. The point is that we shouldn’t get too far removed from one another that we have all of our relationships tied up in technology and we forget how to interact with others. Take some time to actually call or even have a face-to-face conversation with people every once in a while. There really is no substitute for face-to-face conversations. When’s the last time you took the time to pick up the phone and call somebody or meet them in-person, rather than text, email or Tweet them?

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