Perils of technology

Were you one of the many people who were out photographing the moon last night? I was lucky enough to glance out the window just as it was rising, but at times like these I do wish I had a better camera: Mine refused to capture the bright orange of the moon, and then turned everything else blue. I kind of like the effect, but it's not at all what I was seeing.

...which is one of the problems with technology, I think. It's fabulous stuff -- don't get me wrong: I love all the advances just this decade, let alone the last 40 years. But everything technology produces is an ephemeral approximation: it's not actually the real thing.

Which means we have created that much more distance between ourselves and reality.  I mean, naming, categorizing, and generalizing already make it easy to not actually see what we're looking at.  But now we see couples all the time who are not interacting with each other but rather with their cell phones. I know: I do it, too.  But how will we ever learn to be fully present to creation if instead of appreciating it we are photographing it, blogging about it, texting or tweeting it and then posting it on Facebook?

I know this is not an original thought.  I'm just saying...