Don't U txt 2 much?

(Updated Saturday, April 29, 2006 , 5:20 AM ), Fresno Bee

While having a cup of joe in my campus coffee shop, some friends and I were going back and forth on the popularity of blogs.

Unlike most of my friends, and I am sure you, I am not a member of MySpace, Facebook or any other online information-sharing Web site. It seems these rather newly acceptable, informal modes of communication often lead to more harm than good.

Sure, they are great for catching up with old friends long forgotten or meeting new ones. But is that really the aim of these sites? Or the people using them? I would argue that they are not as simple as we would like to think of them.

Our culture is deficient in communication due in large part to technology. We talk on our cell phones now more than ever. We text message on them almost more than we talk on them, and largely rely on the Internet to communicate with at least a portion of our friends.

No clue

Our generation has no clue how to properly address a letter or start a conversation. "I'm so tired" echoes through our empty conversation over and over again. Increasingly, we are becoming dependent on technology to serve as mediator of our arguments, textual abbreviations to relay our emotions and the security of a 19-inch monitor to hide behind.

The creators of these ultra-popular sites are simply playing to our weaknesses as young people. We'd like to think we are incredibly busy and don't have time to communicate any other way but by blogging, texting or instant messaging. We have more discretionary time in college than at any other point in time of our lives. So if we cannot make time now for forms of personal communication when will we ever be able to?

True friendships are not cultivated online but in person. They take effort and energy, neither of which is important to the online version. You don't simply get to invite friends into your life or ignore a member of the world you wish to avoid.

Yet these are principles fundamental to the popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook. Sure, superficially they appeal to our desire to be connected, but on a more fundamental level, they hit at our darker undersides.

Our longings to escape accountability, to not have to interact with those we don't like or deal with the consequences of relationships gone bad. They touch on our laziness as a culture. We want to believe that we can control who we share our lives with and how much ability we give them to influence us.

Small, smaller, smallest

Somehow these things have become virtuous to us. Online relationships have become just as legitimate as those we have had since second grade. Updating a blog has become more important than making time to spend with the people around us. Dorm rooms become increasingly small, as do the number of social interactions, as the sphere of online communication grows.

Do we truly wonder why divorce rates are through the roof? Why apathy continues to plague our generation? The answer is not online communication. It is, however, what makes it thrive. We do not interact well with people close to us. Nor do we value personal communication. We would rather "get more important things done" than spend time with our families and friends.

When is the last time you spent time around the dinner table? Take the time to invest in the people around you, the clerk at grocery store — or perhaps even those you call friends.

Donald Norman of Clovis is a political science major at Fresno Pacific University . This commentary first appeared in The Syrinx, the FPU student newspaper.