I love Relevant magazine.

This is another really challenging gem that I ran across this morning...giving validity to things I've been thinking for awhile and forcing me to look at my own technology habits and start holding myself more accountable.

"To truly understand the purpose and power of a technology we must identify its innate bias. All technologies come with biases that cause users to naturally prefer certain things. The basic bias of facebook updates and Twitter is that it encourages everyone to share whatever is on your mind in real time; it begs for your thoughts at all times. It's a constant reminder to externalize our thoughts. These updates may be profound, but more often they are mostly a twitch of the brain- a mental fidget adding to the static of the universe.

This inadvertently reinforces the narcissism of the digital age. Twitter helps me believe even my most mundane thoughts are now somehow important and need to be shared. It begs me to step out of the stream of experience long enough to record it. The effect is that we are no longer present in any of our experiences. We are living as unpaid journalists who chronicle life as it passes by.

This may seem insignificant. But our presence matters. Our brief but increasingly frequent moments of absence add up. Imagine a father who flickers in and out of a child's life every time he checks his iPhone. He might be there physically, but he may as well be at the office or on a business trip. People can feel our absence. And it is usually a loss. We become digital nomads glancing around the globe, never fully present. It is a ghost-like condition. It diminishes one of God's greatest gifts to us-a body. There is a reason God made us with bodies. There is a reason God became a body in Jesus. The incarnation is about becoming a body to bless the world through physical presence in the lives of others. To hold the hand of those who grieve, to feed and clothe those who are poor, to love those who are alone by being 'with' them. Many of these technologies create a condition of absence in a world desperate for our presence."
~Shane Hipps
Relevant Magazine