Friends in a digital age

Part of the reason for this blog is an attempt to make it easier to keep in touch with my friends.

And that's just stupid at some level. We live in an age of unparalleled communication, with cellular phones plugged directly into our ears via Bluetooth headsets, easy e-mail, old fashioned "snail" mail, cordless home phones, hands-free car phones, Blackberries, the lot of it. And yet it seems its harder and harder to maintain contact with our friends.

I know that some of us comes down to us, at a personal level. It requires an effort to email, to call, to even do this. Yet it seems like so many of us just don't find the time to put in that effort. I'm as guilty as the next guy, but at least it's not because I'm wasting my time on YouTube or something.

It just seemed a lot easier when we were younger, when we were in school. And I suppose that's ultimately what it comes down to. Pure geography. Not even in a larger sense, but in the sense that we just don't see each other on a daily basis. Far too often I think there's a sense of "out of sight, out of mind." We get so caught up in our daily lives that we don't always carve out time in our own heads for our friends.

I guess maybe this makes me something of a Luddite, longing for simpler days before digital friendships. Maybe it's inherently romantic at some level. But I do wish that I connected with my friends more often, and in person, than in some sort of digital-binary way.