Does Technology Have an Impact on Family Interactions?

There's certainly less face-to-face interaction between members of families. But if a family really wants to spend time together, the members that are really serious will spend time together. On the flip side, technology connects people. I'm away at college and I talk to my mom almost every day and email my family all the time. My brother lives in North Carolina (I'm in NY) and I can talk to him because of tech like phones and computers. Granted, he is a bit of a--cough cough--luddite; he rarely checks his email and he and his wife never turn on the one cell phone they have between them. Sort of in that vein, technology also has the power to hurt family relationships. I (as a child of the '90s) am more comfortable with any sort of technology than are, say, my grandparents, or even my mother. I will be the first to admit that while I'm trying to teach them something about the computer, or the digital camera, or their cell phones I can be a bit short with them, and they, in turn, get fed up with me. Consequently, we sometimes have to avoid some subjects of conversation, because we'll all get annoyed with each other. Or like with my brother, who I have to call and actually talk to (so old-fashioned!) on the phone, I would talk to him a lot more if he would just log into his email more than once a month (*grrr*). Though (and not thinking of my brother (whose aversion to technology is baffling to me)) perhaps this disconnect between me and my grandparents is just the normal distancing of generations. Since we don't have a control scenario, we'll probably never know. So, good or bad? C'mon, you know I loathe such subjective and arbitrary classifications...

Anchored to a Sandbar; or, The Truth is Always Shifting

Plinky asked: "Is it always better to know the truth, even when it hurts?"

Not always. Sometimes (excuse the expression) you can't handle the truth. Are you going to tell a five-year-old that his mommy was raped and dismembered in Central Park? When Grandma has Alzheimer's in the nursing home and every day forgets that Grandpa died five years ago are you going to break her heart every day so she isn't misinformed? What about if you've just moved in with someone, and maybe life isn't that grand because you have to scrape for rent and food but you're happy, but if you tell your dad he'll sweep in and take you away and you'll spend the rest of your life being mollycoddled?

The easiest answer is "yes, the truth is always the best," but that seems very monochromatic to me. Shades of grey means that nothing's easy. Besides (and I promise I'll restrain from expanding on this) but what is the truth? Something you may see as absolute truth - for instance that it is time for you to move away from your family and start your own life - may not be absolute for someone else - like your little sister, who draws strength from your closeness and appreciates that you don't leave her to deal with mom and dad all alone.

The truth can limit a person, too. Sometimes, if you don't know the truth (for instance, your friend's truth that your artwork is dull and unoriginal) it turns out not to be the truth (when you end up having a show in a gallery in SoHo). Truth is inconstant, and as a species we give it way too much credit.

Someone Who Deserves More Credit

Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Darwin and a collecter of exotic specimens. A few years after Darwin's famous voyage Wallace made an expedition to Malaysia and spent several years there. Unlike Darwin who'd had a top notch education, was from a successful family, and was employed as the Beagle's naturalist and so was paid, roomed, and fed, and well off after he returned to England, Wallace was a self-made man who was funding his own adventures in Malaysia from the sale of the specimens he sent back. Before that Wallace had been in South America for several years, collecting live specimens and preserving others, but on the voyage back to England his ship had caught fire and everyone had been forced to abandon ship, leaving the ship and most of the specimens (Wallace had possessed the presence of mind to save a few sketches) to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic. However his agent had sold the specimens he had managed to ship back to England and with this money and despite this misfortune he had determined to travel to Malaysia. In Malaysia he had lived a tough life, sleeping in a hut on stilts in the humid heat of the jungle, listening to the rumblings of distant tigers in the night. He went out every day collecting insects, and became fascinated with the many flashy butterflies of the area. In the process he developed the theory of evolution /independently of Darwin./ He sent many letters back to England, publishing in minor journals, hoping to gain opinions on his radical ideas. And they were radical, so radical that Darwin had not yet published the ideas he'd been sitting on for some time. Wallace also sent a paper he wrote on evolution to his friend Darwin for academic criticism. Darwin finally published, and though Wallace had independently come to the same ideas and published earlier Darwin was showered with praise and immortalized as the father of the theory of evolution. Still, Wallace never begrudged his friend the fame. For starting over when his ride home from South America went down in flames, for braving the jungles of Malaysia, for publishing without thinking of social consequences, and for his willingness to take a back seat to his friend Darwin I think Alfred Russel Wallace deserves more credit.