He stopped short of calling texting and social networks the devil's playground, but nevertheless Archbishop Vincent Nichols warned us all in an interview today that these "dehumanizing" practices can often lead to suicide.
That's right. When little Timmy gets Susie to "sext" him nudie pics in class, not only are both parties degrading the moral fabric of our civilized society, they're also contributing to the growing number of transient relationships Nichols feels is slowly killing us all.
"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," he said in a Sunday interview that was probably not conducted over email or IM.
While I agree that anything can be abused if done in excess, the suicide note seems a bit alarmist and anti-technology, even for the Catholic church. Then again, I've (luckily) never had the misfortune to know someone who was driven to suicide because I un-friended them on Facebook.
That said, we've seen some freaky cases where crazy shit's happened on these networks... maybe the ol' Archbishop has a point. What do you think? [Reuters]