Breaking the confines of iphone isolation

This NYT article writes warmly of the days when address books, newspapers were touched, held, reviewed and seen by others. Even the very act of seeing a friend, a parent, was nourishment to the soul.

Now we battle against what is both the panacea for lack of communication but also the confusion of lack of contact.

“I hear you”, “yes, yes” are said while real attention is paid to texts, emails and that urgent news that we are tempted to believe will have no validity unless we read it.

“I thought about this for the first time a few months ago, when I was waiting out my twin sons’ soccer practice, reading “Binocular Vision,” a collection of short stories by Edith Pearlman, on my iPhone. The boys were dribbling their way around cones; I was in the gym bleachers, moved by Pearlman’s meditations on mortality, having a bit of a moment in an unlikely place. None of this was obvious to an observer, which didn’t strike me as important until a woman a few feet away turned to me. “Look at us,” she said, with a sheepish smile, gesturing at a row of parents hunched over their devices. “Our kids are out there practicing, and we’re all on our phones.”

Ultimately our communication will always be enhanced when it is incarnational, person to person and especially “eye-to-eye”.