On a Shrinking World

I love it when the world proves to be smaller than expected, but all things should have a limit.

During my childhood, I had my share of friends moving away at different points. One friend, Tony G., moved away during our freshman year of high school. This was in the early 1990s. This was before the expansion of the internet and well before cell phone plans with no long distance charges. Keeping in touch with friends who moved away was done the old fashioned way—through letters and the occasional phone call permitted begrudgingly by parents.

Fast forward to my last quarter at UCLA. It was 1999. I was taking Latin for no other reason than I thought it would be fun. I was not planning on a career in a field that relies heavily on Latin-derived jargon. I simply thought it would be cool to take Latin. I had met the requirements for my major and was just earning units at this point. Near the end of the quarter, I hear someone call out my name. It was Tony G. We had easily lost contact for probably five years. It was such a pleasant surprise seeing him there. The best part was he was taking Ancient Greek next door. I love the odds that we both decided on taking dead languages at that precise moment in our lives.

The world seemed a little smaller with that reunion.

That reconnection makes for good storytelling, but I have plenty of other moments of reconnection. Leaving home to attend college means separation from your old high school friends. Graduation from college means another separation, and suddenly you have old college friends. I consider myself to be fortunate to have been born in the late 1970s. Not only do I have fond memories of music videos on MTV, but I also was able to experience separation and serendipitous reconnection.

Essentially, I lived a lot of life before social networking boomed into existence. For this, I am thankful.

Now young adults really don’t have to leave old friends behind. They can stay connected through social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Websites like those have allowed me to make contact with many old lost friends (including Tony G. who I had lost contact with after reconnecting at UCLA). So far my childhood friends have become amazing adults! So a big part of me likes these sites, but the mother part of me is afraid for my son.

Will my son experience that separation and the subsequent joy that comes with reconnection? He will not because the world has grown too small.The readily available connections of our age mean he won’t get to experience those absences.

It is when I think of these sorts of things that I feel old and a bit old-fashioned. I feel like I am morphing into this caricature of a mom who says to her child, “You know when I was your age ::insert memory here::”

But I’m sure that I am not alone. I am sure that these feelings are fairly universal. Each generation pities the next for missing out on those special moments. I’m curious as to what my worries my own mother harbored watching me grow up. Did she worry that I was pampered by a word processor when she had to use a typewriter? Was she concerned that cable television would rob me of my imagination?

Then I think of my son having a child of his own. And I cannot fathom what he and members of his generation will think as they watch their own children live in this increasingly shrinking accelerated world.