Haha! I didn't mean to write so much!! :) 

I've been thinking more about this the last couple days and I have a couple more thoughts. First, I think what the mom about  her young daughter is interesting. Today's teenager doesn't remember a time when either the anonymity of Internet social pools OR without the "omni-present" quality of relationships through cell phones and especially, texting. I'm 32, started blogging a couple years ago and have been on facebook for less than a year and started texting about a month ago. The contrasts between my social interactions before and since the technology is huge. I can talk to virtually anyone I know (or to strangers, if I so desire) at any time of day or night, something that is still a novelty. 

The collapsing of "walls" this technology allows for has both a negative and positive face. Our children being "safe" inside the walls of our home isn't something we can take for granted. Inappropriate intimacy can be developed between either strangers or acquaintances, with parents or spouses none the wiser. But on the other hand, I know from experience that this "wall-less" world allows for friendship, understanding between and the formation of community between people in separate continents. The world is smaller. Our children have a much more realistic understanding of the "humanity" of people outside of their community, culture and continent. In the two years of blogging I've done, I have become friends with women all over the world. I've exchanged gifts with Ginny from the UK, conducted an online workshop with a woman from Australia who I went on to meet in person at an art retreat last Fall. I have become close to, talk in the phone with and plan to visit a customer-turned-friend from Italy, who I also met in person at the retreat. My relationships online have absolutely NOTHING to do with physical proximity; they are completely about having interests in common with one another. 

This new world without walls makes people thousands of miles away, our neighbors. The potential for interacting directly with people in need is no longer limited to the people who live in our physical neighborhood. So yes, I could give to a cause I know virtually nothing about only because someone tweeted about it. But I could also develop a personal relationship with the nun who runs an orphanage in rural Benin, get to know the children through exchange of photos, notes and potentially even webcam. My children could grow up having a more personal relationship with little girls and boys in that orphanage than I had with my first cousins who lived on the opposite coast from us. Our family could save up and go visit the orphanage one summer. We could help one of the kids come to live here when they graduate and fund their college education. One of my children could wind up marrying an orphan from Benin they've known virtually their whole life. 

My point is this: technology allows for both incredibly impersonal, non-compassionate giving but it can also be the means by which a new generation of adults who don't just imagine need but are actually intimately acquainted with it. That can not however excuse my family or I from ignoring our actual neighbors' needs. This is actually more difficult compassion; we can turn the web cam off and not read the emails but the physical needs of the people who share a fence with us have to be (should be) responded to consistently and within the context of an actual relationship. It's far more exciting to put together a package for the orphanage and then see photos of the kids wearing the clothes we sent than it is to offer babysitting for the single mom whose only way out of poverty is taking night classes.