There was a time when keeping in touch with friends and family meant getting the help of a telephone operator, a telephone connected to a wall, and a good bit of money.
With the invention of the internet, keeping up with the goings on of family members is much easier…and a whole lot cheaper; even if we don’t know where they are.
I still use a phone for some family, but I also use texting, and Facebook to keep track of my family members who are scattered from ne side of the country to the other.
My brother spent nearly 25 years in the U.S. Army including tours in Korea, Germany, Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. While deployed in the Middle East during Desert Storm, my brother’s unit location was unknown…only that he was somewhere in the desert. Still the early days of the commercial internet and email, companies charged for each use – much like the old long distance phone calls. But during Desert Storm, Compuserv allowed a single e-mail each day free of charge to a military member who had been deployed. It was my only way to make any contact with my brother. We had no idea of where he was but at least we knew that he was alive…and relatively safe.
Today we use the phone and texting and sometimes pass messages back and forth on Facebook.
Technology is a double edged sword – it can be a wonderful thing to make our lives easier; but it can also be a bad thing, but when it comes to communicating with others, life is much easier these days.