Connected!

● Consider this imaginary scenario. People called Sam the holdout. For years, he refused to get involved with the new technology as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends. Everyone, even Sam’s teenage children, said that they wanted to be connected. Sam teasingly said to his 16-year-old daughter, “I miss the days when people would talk to you face-to-face!”

Then Sam started to reconsider his stance. He thought about people he had neither seen nor talked to in years. He thought about family members who seemed so busy that he no longer felt connected with them. ‘If I want to stay in touch with all these people,’ Sam thought to himself, ‘I might have to start doing it the new way.’ It was the mid-20th century in the rural United States. Sam, the holdout, was finally thinking about getting a telephone.

Fast-forward this scenario to 2012. Sam’s grandson Nathan has just finished talking on the phone to Roberto and Angela, close friends of his who had moved to the other side of the world. ‘That was ten years ago!’ Nathan says to himself, amazed at how quickly the time had passed.

Over the years, Nathan has been content with an occasional phone call from family members and friends who have moved far away. Now, though, it seems that everyone​—including Nathan’s teenage children—​use a social network to keep in touch.

People call Nathan a holdout because he refuses to jump on the technology bandwagon. “I miss the days when you would talk on the phone and hear a person’s voice,” he says. But now Nathan is starting to reconsider. ‘If I want to stay in touch with all these people,’ he says to himself, ‘I might have to start doing it the new way.’

Have you felt the way Nathan did? By nature, humans like to communicate with each other. (Genesis 2:18; Proverbs 17:17) Since so many are doing so by means of social networks, what should you know about this technology?