Digital Sin

My Dad sent me this interest post from Noel's Man-Crush, Mark Driscoll's blog about the invasion of cell phones and other personal electronic devices on vacations, family time and relationships. He recently took a 3 week vacation where he determined to leave behind technology:

Being unplugged from my technology also made me more aware of how much it lords over us as a beeping, ringing, and vibrating merciless sovereign god. I was grieved when I went to the pool every day with my kids to swim and play catch in the water and looked around the pool only to see other parents not connecting with their children at all but rather talking on their cell phones and dinking around on their handheld mobile devices while sitting in lounge chairs. When we went out for meals we saw the same thing. Parents with children were commonly interrupted throughout the meal by their technology and spent more time talking on the phone than to their family. To make matters worse, these people were actually quite loud and were incredibly annoying to the rest of us who do not want to hear whether or not their friend Hank fs nasty inner thigh rash had cleared up.

I sat in a customer meeting yesterday with a group of very high level executives. As we talked to each other, every paid attention for the most part. As soon as someone started talking on the conference call, we all immediately reached for our crackberries to see what was going on. Today the second my plane landed in Detroit, everyone in First class (including myself) started checking e-mail. John Eldredge once said that if you want to see if you're addicted to something, stop doing it for a few days and see how you respond. Ugh.