The students that I have now are so digitally connected that to sit and have a face-to-face with them is like sitting on nails.  They would much rather talk to me through a screen.

—Jon Justice, youth minister from the Warrenton Church of Christ
in Virginia, on technology’s impact on the church

Admit it.  The holiday season has just begun, and already we’re overwhelmed by so much… face time.  It’s hard, face-to-face emoting, face-to-face empathizing, face-to-face expressing, face-to-face criticizing.  Thank goodness for less face time; when it comes to disrupting, if not severing, lifetimes of neurotic relational patterns, technology works even better than psychotherapy. 

We look askance at those young adults in a swivet of tech-enabled multi-friending, endlessly texting, tracking one another’s movements — always distracted from what they are doing by what they are not doing, always connecting to people they are not with rather than people right in front of them.

But being neither here nor there has real upsides.  It’s less strenuous.  And it can be more uplifting.  Or, at least, safer, which has a lot going for it these days.

Face time — or what used to be known as spending time with friends and family — is exhausting.  Maybe that’s why we’re all so quick to abandon it.  From grandfathers to tweenies, we’re all taking advantage of the ways in which we can avoid actually talking, much less seeing, one another — but still stay connected.

The last time I had face time with my mother, it started out fine.  “What a lovely blouse,” she said, plucking lovingly (as I chose to think) at my velvet sleeve.  I smiled, pleased that she was noticing that I had made an effort.  “Too bad it doesn’t go with your skirt.”  Had we been on Skype, she would never have noticed my (stylishly intentional, I might add, just ask Marni) intriguing mix of textures.  And I would have been spared another bout of regressive face time freakout.