The need for humanity in the so-called cyberworld

With last Sunday's near fatal crash of my blog, I have been reflecting all week on blogging. My reflection was intensified somewhat by the decision of a friend to discontinue blogging for wholly healthy and good reasons. From time-to-time I like to step back and evaluate my on-line endeavor, which I began tentatively back in August 2005 and took up in earnest in July 2006. Since then blogging has constituted part of my daily life. Yesterday I decided to "Google" Καθολικός διάκονος. Predictably, most of the returns were links back to this blog. More disturbingly and downright puzzling were several links to sites like sex-while-dating-child-support-parents.searchforsinglesmeetsingles.com and get-laid-without-being-broke-file-divorce.searchforsinglesmeetsingles.com. Huh? I can't think of another arena of endeavor in which one's brand, if you will, can be so easily high-jacked and associated in any way with purposes with which it is so at odds. Overlooking the fact that nothing could be more contrary to the tone and tenor of what I post here, such sites are a truly sad commentary about what many people look for on-line.

From Make Better Shirts

What people are looking for, whether they know it or not, is fulfillment, satisfaction, happiness. What makes it sad is that seeking hook-ups, looking at pornography, even playing W.O.W. for hours, or days, on end, will never result in any of the above. The nature of addiction, which results in wanting and needing more, more, and still more of whatever it is you are addicted to, even unto death, demonstrates this quite well. Nonetheless, I am happy to join with others who seek to be salt and light in the cyber realm, pointing people to what (more accurately, Who) can truly satisfy.

I have never had site meter on this blog, nor will I ever. Up until late last summer I truly had no idea how many people visited Καθολικός διάκονος on daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Well now, Blogger automatically applies Google Stats to all blogs and with a few mouse clicks I can pull up and look at not only how many people visit, but where they link here from, and what posts they look at. For those of you who are concerned about privacy, there is no individual information provided, all data is aggregated. The reason I mention this is because sometimes in the daily stats I will see a huge surge in visits to my blog from some weird source, like this one "local news update. Welcome to the digital jungle!

On a much more positive note, I found that my blog made the Our Sunday Visitor reader's choice The very best of the Catholic Web list. I was even more surprised that I had been submitted under the opinion category by a friend, who was a professor of mine, Susan Windley-Daoust, who wrote: "Good intellectual thoughtful op-ed on matters in the Church and spiritual life by a deacon in Salt Lake City." Dr. Windley-Daoust blogs under the name Ironic Catholic. I appreciate this endorsement very much and certainly hope those who visit Καθολικός διάκονος find all that and even more. Not just by way of a courtesy quid pro quo, I highly recommend adding the IC (as her blog is known by the cool kids in the Catholic blogosphere) to your favorites.

Having to reconstruct the design of my blog was an opportunity to freshen it up a little, while maintaining continuity with the past. One thing I did not change was my statement of purpose, which appears under the title. I really worked at shaping and honing this for a long time. Therefore, I truly mean that "This is a public cyberspace in which I seek to foster Christian discipleship in the late modern milieu in the diakonia of koinonia and in the recognition that 'the Eucharist is the only place of resistance to annihilation of the human subject.'" The quote at the end of the sentence is from Archbishop Francisco Javier Martinez.

The Internet and our ever more advanced means of communication bring many advantages to us, but also present many threats and pitfalls to our common humanity on a deeply existential, that is, relational level. The so-called cyberworld is just another aspect of the real world, albeit one that expands our notion of reality and alters, at least to some extent, our relationship to time and space. Over and above the concerns with which I began this post are other concerns about how all of this impacts us both individually and collectively. I have been struck of late by a series of commercials by Sprint Mobile that do a far better, not to mention more entertaining, job of highlighting these concerns than I could do by writing about them: