technology vs relationship

Well once again I am trying to keep an online journal of sorts. I love the written word, but I don't love technology and prefer to actually sit down and write in a journal with my own hand. However, I am about to succomb to the world as we know it and learn to use a computer. I have a terrible feeling that my journal may become only a music writing book, and no longer a chronicle of my life with words and pictures and momentos. Is this what we have come to now? A depersonalized way of expressing our emotions? Where we have to choose emoticons to tell someone how we feel instead of coming up with words of our own? Oh it makes me sad...as an artist and a communicator. It makes me fear having children, that they will grow up in a world I don't understand and can't function in entirely. What if our children grow up unable to truly communicate their thoughts and feelings because they are unaccustomed to face to face social interaction?

I believe in every possible way that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So although technology allows us many things that we have never had before - information at our fingertips, networking to the extreme, convenience and connection - it also has an equal and opposite downside. The removal of proper grammer teaching in our education system (replaced by LOL's and OMG's and without any correct punctuation), the dependance on something that we have no control over (what if the internet goes down - God forbid - and we have to function without it for a day), and the decline of human social interaction.

Any move forward is neither good nor bad, it is simply what it is. Because each new idea and transformation of society comes with change and adaptation. New things at the expense of the old. And it is no wonder many of us are coming back to the desire for true community in the midst of this new world. We seem to have come full circle and see more than ever our need for real and active friendship and partnership, for honesty that comes from knowing someone intimately and not simply online. Can we marry our search for new ways to network while understanding our opposite need to know and be known?

So here I sit, writing in the midst of this dichotomy. Even within myself I have to begin to embrace this technological world around me and balance it with quiet.