More than 800 million of the world’s 7 billion people are connected via Facebook. When you also consider mobile phones, email, Skype, and other social media, the world is exponentially more connected than it was even a generation ago. And yet our lives are more fragmented and scattered than ever. People hang out together, but doing different things in different worlds on their handheld devices. Even children don’t play together anymore. After school they retreat into their separate electronic worlds of gaming, sexual prurience, and social media networks. Even our thought lives are scattered. Between emails, incoming texts, and Facebook alerts, a train of thought has become an antique.
This follows the scattering brought on by the automobile and the isolation that air conditioning gave us. Who sits out on the front porch anymore or talks over the back fence? We drive to far-flung superstores where we shop with strangers if we don’t shop online. Families scatter upon graduation from college. My father-in-law’s four girls now live in Massachusetts, New York, Wyoming, and California. And we are scattered even in death. How is a family plot possible under these conditions? My grandparents were cremated and their ashes thrown to the wind—the ultimate scattering.
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