Cyber Spirituality: The Difference Within

Cyber Spirituality: The Difference Within

Let's go back ten years ago from today where high definition televisions were expensive and computers weighed more than most people cared to carry around. As we go back twenty years more there was no worldwide web and continuing on back thirty years when very few people even owned a computer. And yet today, we are able to have a laptop that weighs close to around 5 pounds, but holds information well beyond what we could've even imagined ten years ago. Today we look upon the content that has surrounded our Nation, the internet is chalk full of everything from online movies, search bases, and our most popular Facebook and Twitter. We have become socially attached to these fundamentals, wherein reality people lived day in and day out ten, twenty, thirty years ago without social media. The world of difference has molded our innovation to think that without Facebook, Twitter, and all of these other facades that we as humans could not function. We find that there are countless numbers of people who spend hours on end glued to the internet. Are we solely based to be subject to the overpowering growth of this phenomenon? Is social media taking over too much of the way we communicate with each other?

Facebook was founded on February 4th 2004 which started an unlikely spectacle that has spread all over the world with more people on Facebook than there are in the United States at the current time. Twitter, although not as common, has still had an impact since 2006. Both of these sites play the role of the ability to keep in touch with others, display our thoughts and opinions, and to socially involve ourselves in certain ways in which we don't think about doing other than on the web. It's only a place to express ourselves and yet has become where we can lose ourselves, in her book Cyberville, Stacy puts it, "The others? It's a mixed bag. Of just people. Living breathing people. Virtual communities are alive with people. Your mother, your father, sister, brother, boss, ex-lover. Newcomers to cyberspace forget this. There are real people here, and what you say or do here has consequences in your life and in theirs" (Horn). Simply put, we are coming to forget that there are real people away from the computer that are itching to have a better relationship than one cyber based.

Those who are among the younger generation find themselves losing valuable contact with communication toward everyone around them. Through his book, No Sense of Place, Joshua implies, "Almost everyone who has commented on electronic media, whether as casual observer or as scholar, whether in praise or in condemnation, has noted the ability of electronic media to bypass former limitations to communication" (Meyrowitz). It is much easier to get on the computer and say what you want to say about basically anything which usually involves what has happened