The obvious has really hit me in the last few weeks… the Internet has changed everything.
We don’t have very many friends with babies near us geographically, but we do have friends with babies in other parts of the country. Email and Facebook have become Vida’s primary way of trading baby stories and tips, and it’s how she’s staying connected at 3am.
Similarly we get a lot of our baby info from websites like babycenter.com and answers.yahoo.com when we probably would have relied almost entirely on books and advice from friends and family just 10 years ago.
And that’s only how it’s affecting our own lives. I can only imagine what it be like for Maddox as a kid of hyper-connected parents living in an urban setting. He’ll never know things any other way. Socializing through networked Nintendo DS games will feel as natural as trading scary stories under a blanket by flashlight. Social networks will be as familiar as the playground down the street, and long distance friends will live a lot farther away than just the next town over.
None of this is new information to me, and of course nothing will replace face to face friendships or swinging on monkey bars, but somehow thinking about this is different now. I guess maybe Maddox has changed everything, too!
