Social media, blogs, message boards, smart phones, anything that's used to connect people, they're all wonderful mechanisms towards effecting genuine understanding, authentic change, real intimacy. But they're only tools, each one a means to an end. They're not ends in themselves. They can't be, in the same way that the telephone wasn't an end in itself.
While I'm heartened by the power of the Internet to increasingly make things happen (or make nothing happen all the faster), I believe that ultimately, we need to be breathing the same air in order for something to happen in a specific place, to effect real change in the real world.
Hence this new motto of mine.
