We live in an easily accessible world of communications with many apps for every need and like. There are new languages of abbreviations to make the sending of texts and messages more “simple and quick.”
We live in a virtual world of instant communications.
Means of communication are necessary and good, but not when we allow them to interfere in direct and personal communication or when they evade human contact and hearing one another’s voices.
Today’s world of communications helps us to connect with each other more easily. It launches us into a universe practically without limits, so we can be virtually in communication with whomever we want and wherever we want.
It is sad and worrisome to see families or friends in restaurants who are so disconnected with each other, to be communicating with someone else in another place, or entertained in their own worlds of information and gossip.
Technology has allowed us to ignore the presence of our neighbor and be disconnected from the real world of human communication.
In a world obsessed with communications, we forget that what is virtual is not real. It is a system of competition for having the greatest number of virtual friends, with the stress of seeking approval.
In this excessive—and often obsessive—eagerness, an immense void is created. It’s an impressive loneliness due to the absence of real communication with oneself, with others, contact with human warmth and not with the cold text message.
Sometimes when we immerse ourselves in this excessive desire for communications, we fail in the first and most important of all communications—the communication with our own reality, with our own heart and the real communication with our neighbor.
Love is only possible when we live and lose the fear of sharing and are open to the true sound of the human voice, to the feelings of the heart and the silence of prayer.
Loneliness is the absence of a real world of love, the absence of listening to the word of our neighbor and the absence of prayer.
Technology and communications are good and necessary, as long as we do not allow ourselves to be disconnected from that listening to our own heart. We must make sure that virtual communication does not interfere with our relationship of listening to the word of God and of our neighbors, parents, brothers, sisters and friends.
Let us not allow the virtual world to disconnect us from knowing and living the real world of love.