I remember the day that my first “real” boss told me that he could talk to people around the world with his ham radio.  He explained that because of skip propagation (and a whole lot of other tech stuff I don’t remember) when the conditions in the atmosphere were just right, you could bounce a radio wave off of a cloud and reach the other side of the planet.  As a young teen that idea was incredible to me!  I think I knew about the internet at that point, but I don’t think Myspace had been invented yet, so I didn’t really understand the power that was accessible to me online.  When I learned that with a simple radio I could be connected to someone all the way on the other side of the planet, I was impressed!

Now that I’ve gotten older I remember that there was a point when the Internet (or the world wide web as some would call it) was an incredible way to connect with people around the globe.  You really could reach out to and talk to someone from Japan, or Russia, or South Africa if you knew how to find them.   You didn’t have to wait for the right atmospheric conditions to talk to someone you had never met in real life (or IRL as the kids are calling it these days…dang whippersnappers).  You just had to know where to find them!

I even remember the time that I went to meet a girl I had only talked to online.  (I know this is a terrible idea…I was young and foolish.)  I walked up to her front door, knocked and was introduced to her parents and all of her siblings.  We ended up playing Clue together as a group, but I was so nervous that I wasn’t really paying attention to the game, and my inattention made it look like I was trying to cheat.  Needless to say neither I or the girl were too heartbroken when our budding romance was killed by a sudden cold snap!

The internet isn’t really like that anymore.

There was a point in the evolution of the internet that it became easier to find people.  At some point I got my first social media account, and realized that I could almost “collect” people and connections.  I could ask anyone to be my friend, and then unfriend them when I wanted to end the “relationship”.  For a socially awkward person like me, this was kinda like being popular.  I could actually count the people who let me call them a friend, and I could control the “relationship” on my terms, friend-ing and unfriending at will.  It was great!

Eventually, the thrill wore off.

I found myself “friends” with people I didn’t really know or identify with.  So I sent them away.  I unfriended them.  If someone stepped out of line or said something I didn’t want to hear, I could solve the problem with one mouse click.  Trimming your friends became almost as important as collecting them in the first place.  The slightest provocation was enough to drop you off of my radar, and out of my friends list.

I know that I am not the only one who found themselves doing this.  Unfriending or blocking someone is now considered an important part of the social media skill set.   Say something I didn’t like, or don’t like something I said?   You better unfriend me before I unfriend you.

Of course as adults we are far more subtle about this, but the results are the still the same.

We find ourselves surrounded by people who will ONLY tell us what WE want to hear.

Social media allows us to control who can speak to us, and many of us are guilty of using that to ignore hard truths that others NEED to speak into our lives.   We have lost the ability to lovingly guide someone towards a new perspective, or towards a new idea.  We have found a perfect way to ensure that our feelings aren’t hurt and our egos are not deflated.

You must be like us…or else!

Their voices whisper softly into our ears, telling us how great we are, how right we are, and how wrong everyone who thinks differently is.  Truth has seemingly become objective, because we create our own truths for our own people groups.  Our fallacies are never challenged, and as time goes on, we begin to forget that sometimes there is more than one right answer to a question.  We forget that there can be more than one way to solve a problem.  We forget that the beauty of dialogue, , of diplomacy is found in putting people of different ideas together until they figure out how to make something out of the pieces they have.   Without the pressure to work together, our solutions for real, serious, problems are diminished from lack of creative ideas.

My friend.  If we are ever going to find peace in society, we MUST start listening to ideas that are not our own.  We must start listening to people we don’t agree with, and we must be willing to accept that we are not right about everything.

If we don’t learn from this, our little group of  like-minded people will stand united against outsiders, until the day that society at large fails because our little groups are far too divided to reconcile.

United we stand, divided we fall.