Facebook is for Sinners - The UpStream

The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has called you a sinner. Are you going to take that? Go get him! Wait, no. That would only prove the hypothesis. Let me explain.

Vincent Nichols believes that technology is leading people to suicide because it prevents us from being able to make meaningful emotional connections with each other. He gave an interview the Sunday Telegraph, and said:

Among young people often a key factor in their committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they're desolate.

Friendship is not a commodity, friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it's right... I think there's a worry that an excessive use, or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community.

Now, as much as I normally don't like to agree with anyone ever, I feel I need to in this case. Although many of us are smart enough to know the Internet isn't real,and things that happen here are often ridiculous and mean (like the tone of this article), there are those who are either too young or too stupid to tell the difference. A child or teen may think that people they encounter on Facebook are real friends and get emotionally distraught when the friendship eventually dissolves. My fear is that the church will, rather than helping people deal with the changing world of communications, instead condemn it as evil.

How do you handle when online friends stop talking to you randomly?