Strengthening lifetime and private connections by way of technology

Just lately, I gained an e mail from an outdated mate in England. Tony wrote that his wife’s 70th birthday was coming up, and he is inquiring their lots of close friends to send playing cards to her in treatment of their son, so she would get them all at once at a surprise celebration. I sent a card — across the Atlantic — with quite a few fantastic needs. And various weeks in the past, I watched on YouTube a friend’s relatives celebration in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Even though COVID has retained us apart physically, technological innovation has brought us together.

And so, without the need of sounding like Pollyanna, with war raging in Ukraine, gasoline prices increasing and COVID not still concluded, there are pleased things taking place, thanks to growing technological know-how.

For case in point, on Monday evenings I have been teaching my Hopkins Odyssey classes on Zoom — 19th century English Romantic poets ideal now. In the earlier two years, my system individuals have arrive from Chicago, San Francisco, New York Town, Florida and Connecticut. A lot of of my friends and I have been getting Smithsonian programs on Zoom.

On Wednesdays at midday, also on Zoom, my Bible Research satisfies with users from three Baltimore City churches taking part. And hundreds of persons have been and however are performing remotely, so steering clear of very long commutes and, in some cases, official costume.

Whilst, as an English instructor, I continue to want to go through common paper books, I admire the Kindle description that creator and former Baltimore Sun reporter Laura Lippman writes in “The Guide Thing”: States she, “books could live within products, glowing like captured genies, desperate to get back out in the world and grant peoples’ needs.”

Talking of granting needs, I recently observed on the PBS NewsHour, a section on 3D printed houses. Via technologies, a house — 1,500 sq. ft with a few bedrooms, two bathrooms and a garage — can be crafted in 24 several hours, and the expense is much less than a common house.

This new job is projected to increase additional than $1.5 billion in 2024. As a consequence, a lot of lower-profits family members who by no means believed they could personal a household, will be equipped to.

The use of technology inside of a property is vast. When I requested Marshall, my tech-savvy cousin in North Carolina, to listing the complex products he and his wife use in their two residences, he very first discussed that before they generate to their second house on the water, a few hours absent, they can, as a result of their telephones, have the electricity turned on as properly as the heat, while in the past, they experienced to request a neighbor to do that.

To estimate Marshall, “between Jan and me, we have two iPhones, two Kindles, a desktop Pc, Home windows laptops, iPads, MacBook professional, printers, scanners, smart Television set, Amazon Echos, etcetera.”

With their phones, in addition to contacting, texting, emailing and photographing, they do all their banking, all their purchasing, as very well as begin their cars and trucks, browse guides and maps, do analysis, and their list goes on.

Of training course, every new creation is not a panacea, and peoples’ usual resistance to adjust is constantly a issue.

The 1 illustration that arrives to brain is the creation of frozen foodstuff. In “The Magnificent Life of Marjorie Write-up,” writer Allison Pataki describes how resistant Marjorie Merriweather Post’s second husband was as CEO of Put up Cereals (ladies could neither hold these kinds of positions nor sit on boards in the early 1900s) when Marjorie desired to get Clarence Birdseye’s smaller frozen-fish business. The good thing is for the planet, Marjorie prevailed, and frozen foods, producing existence much easier and much healthier, are bought and consumed approximately everywhere in the globe.

Certainly, lots of people continue to want to interact in individual nevertheless, employing technology makes everyday living less difficult and connects us in means that never ever seemed possible, a definite beneficial among the our challenges these days.

Lynne Agress, who teaches in the Odyssey Method of Johns Hopkins, is president of BWB-Enterprise Creating At Its Best Inc. and creator of “The Feminine Irony” and “Working With Words in Enterprise and Lawful Producing.” Her email is [email protected].