I am not so sure that it is a good idea to be so connected at times. We are in a world where we can IM/Text/SMS/Voice post our thoughts and feelings or journal/blog about our experiences all secure in the knowledge that we will have instant gratification....that what we write will be, or has been, immediately communicated.
I see several points around this:
1. The first point is that it can allow for us to quickly and easily document things we may wish to follow-up on later or thoughts we want to explore later. In the case of twitter it literally served as a nice way to document my mundane departures and arrivals to let
phawkwood know I hadn't gotten myself killed in Chicago. LOL.
2. These various online services really do let us connect with others and get to know them and the things going on in their lives that we ordinarily would not. I have several friends that I would not otherwise really know or be able to keep up with if it weren't for LJ.
3. While it is very nice to post a thought about things or have a conversation with someone, our attention becomes split and I think we lose the full experience of the things around us. I felt this way in Japan. It was when I realized I had become so focused on getting the pictures and hanging onto the camera as I went places, that I started getting frustrated. The camera and trying to get pictures really interfered with
being there. I didn't necessarily see everything that went on because it took me out of the moment. Pictures are not bad to take here or there, but they can imo overshadow the experiences around you.
I think that our sms/texting/im devices are vulnerable to pretty much doing the same. We no longer really focus on the moment around us and wind up split attention and out of the moment. The conversation can overshadow the experience around a person in much the same way pictures can.
4. Reinforces our thought patterns/habits. One of the points of the Dharma talk last week was that if one person practices finding things they are grateful for each day and the other person practices finding things they are unhappy about, frustrated over, etc.. each day then the first person will be a pretty positive, upbeat individual and the second one is going to be miserable and unhappy. I know while I was in the corporate world I felt like I had allowed myself to focus on negative things all the time. I would even stop posting in LJ because I felt like I was always negative and didn't want that.
I think the online services with their instant gratification of posting allows us to reinforce such things. Though I do think in our world people are more likely to post their 'vents' their negative thoughts rather than their positive ones. It's so easy to just type "my day really sucks" or "my boss is pissing me off" and send it off.
It's too bad our society is focused on the negatives, it would be good to see someone post, even to twitter, about how nice another person was to them that day or other things we might be grateful for in our lives. I think it would be nice to see things like "The store clerk was really happy today."
I suppose it could be used as a way to break out of our patterns too, if the person is able to recognize such things in their lives. When we see one of our negative patterns popping up we could stop and post about something we really enjoy in our lives, or something we are grateful for about the person who may be pissing us off at the moment, how do we have compassion for that person.
5. I think this kind of ties into the previous ones, but with the connectivity and ease of communication I think it really can enable us to rely too much on others and less so on ourselves. An enabler of our poor self-esteems or other neurosis we might have. It becomes a way to escape those things in ourselves and our situations. So that we do not deal with the reality of our daily lives. An escape that can not only take away the focus on our own issues and situation, but can also bring further issues and situations into our lives.
So it is all a double edged sword really. A debate that I know has actually gone on for a while now and much has been written about it. Ultimately technology, connectivity including is neither good nor bad, it's all in how you use it. I could say it comes down to society and the issues we face, blah blah blah, but in anything I truly believe it comes down to personal accountability, views, beliefs, awareness, attitude, etc...