I saw this quote yesterday on Justin Taylor’s blog…

“At City Point on April 1 [1865], Lincoln received reports and sent messages. He haunted the army telegraph office for news of the battles raging in Virginia. He was addicted to this technology.
It was an impatient habit he had formed in Washington. He did not like to wait for important news. To his delight, the War Department telegraph office was a short walk from the Executive Mansion. He became a habitué of the office, befriending the men employed there, to whom he often made surprise visits at any time of the day or night.
Now he was standing over the telegraph operators at City Point, and as soon as they transcribed the reports as they came off the wire, the president snatched the hurried scribblings from their hands.”

James Swanson, Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln’s Corpse (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2010), pp. 18-19.

That was 1865! Am I like that now with twitter and facebook updates and latest news stories? What about you?

Do we even realise we are addicted to technology and the information it gives us?

How many times do you pull your phone from your pocket in a day to check for text messages or emails? Its like a reflex we cannot control for many of us….

As Taylor points out, Abraham Lincoln had a good purpose fuelling this addiction! Do we?

If I am not doing anything in particular I often find myself scrolling through tweets, jumping from one facebook page to another, reading dozens of blogs and really not doing anything worthwhile, all at the same time…….jumping back and forth through web pages I’ve already visited a dozen times just to see if anything has changed………..just wasting time!

Blog content comes out of this….sometimes! Ideas come from his……sometimes!

But is it really just fuelling an addiction? An addiction that has no real definable purpose?

How about you?