I recently asked a group of teenagers what their most important possession was.  To a person, they replied, "My cellphone."  Ah, cellphones.  We love them and we hate them.  We love what they do for us, we recoil at what they are doing to us.  On the other hand, we cannot turn back the clock to the days of pay phones only.  We cannot be the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution, those who rejected the technologies that the Revolution introduced to the Western world.  Unless we live in the world of Jules Verne's Time Machine (or to point to a more recent example, the movie Back to the Future), we cannot go back in time.  As the writer of Ecclesiastes wisely observes, "What is crooked cannot be straightened" (3:15).  Moreover, why should we?  Can the older generation really discern the future of the younger generation?  Can the older generation really imagine that it can fully picture what their younger counterparts will do with the world?  Or what they should do?  Sure, its people can offer advice and wisdom, but it is often the advice and wisdom formed in another age, another time.  Not that some advice is always relevant and useful, just that it is always advice embedded in a past for which the future often has no context.
     We enjoy our technology, we appreciate our technology, and in most instances we literally cannot live without it.  We may worry about technology, we may fret about its effects, particularly those having to do with communication, but we cannot evade or escape them.  It's a losing battle.  So what do we do?  We enter into the capriciousness of existence, and hold on, believing that if a divinely created world does in fact have meaning, everything that it unfolds will, too.  We're just along for the ride.
     And we ride.