Ok Well here we are and it is Wednesday – hump day, halfway there day…

Yea…

Hey!  Did you run out and get your new iPad Mini?

Funny thing is

Today’s Mental Moment …

was all about the iPad Mini – more pointedly how we now have another technological device to facilitate communication and help us feel connected and pretend we have meaningful relationships when we don’t.

Wait… that sounds bitter and judgemental and it wasn’t meant to be.  I have very meaningful relationships with people through the great technology that I would never have met or communicated with, much less been aware of their individual existence a mere… 25 years ago?  10 even, although we had the Internet and ..stuff.

So I am not saying that technology has made any and all relationships shit or not meaningful.   I guess I just feel like for some, it allows being connected to more people with less meaning and even sometimes facilitates that cruise on the Nile..   where we deny things that are glaringly obvious.  For example, having a gazillion friends online does not mean you have a gazillion friends if you don;t even know their full names.  Without technology – well this wouldn;t even be something we were talking about.

Consider This:

Facebook, or any other social media site really, you have a profile and then you add your friends.  When I first got on FB I had not one person on my friends list that I had never met in person.  My friends list consists of people I have met and my family and only recently of people I may not have physically been in the same hemisphere with even, but that I interact with fairly regularly.  There are also people from Highschool that were important to me then and now but that I lost touch with and without the wonderful technology of FB never would have reconnected with.  I think I have about 90.. and I am speaking of personal profile not your blog page or your fan page or whatever just for clarification.

So I go on a younger person’s FB and I see 478 friends.  For real?  So I ask, can you say you have met them all OR interact with them on a regular basis. ?

What is the measure of friendship and meaningful connection?

To facilitate the constant being plugged in feeling we have phones and tablets and ..stuff that can link us up at any given time, which makes it super easy to have superficial interactions with people we don;t really know at all.

Those interactions are ok, as long as you don’t replace or mistake them for, love, companionship (physical) deep abiding friendship or commitment.

And some people consider them differently than others.  I care about the people I come in contact with through technology.  And the connection we have is important to me always but there are different levels.   Some of those connections have gone beyond what we have through technology although technology is the only way we connect…

hmm that is a tough one to explain and grasp, let me try it this way,

Technology makes it easy for us to not fully connect.  For example, you can have a “relationship” with someone who you see maybe once or twice a month, but because they can jot off a text to you every now and then in their mind they might say they are putting effort into the relationship.

Before technology got this far, having a relationship – of any kind, required a bit if effort and ending a “relationship” did not come as easily as one day not answering a text message or just stop sending texts all together.  Technology has made it easy to be inconsiderate.  I am guilty sometimes, how about you?

So, the iPad Mini.  I mean we have iPods, iPhones and iPad – um would it be maxi now?  A funny ha ha I thought up when I saw the story about the iPad mini..  I am not the only one though and as I was going through some videos that were in my weekly you might like email from YouTube, I found that Craig Ferguson thought so too.  Funny guy.  I used to watch his show every night and he really cracks me up so I thought instead of going on about how I find it annoying that there is another high-tech gadget that is clearly designed to fill the gap perceived and of course, make money…   here watch this.

enjoy!

and maybe sometime think about the people in your life and how meaningful, really, your connections are  and what kind of connections you want to have.  Just a thought.

To your Mental State whatever it may be.