On Facebook today, I saw that my college friends’ children head off to college. A high school friend posted a
picture of his award for Most Valuable Teacher of the Year. I could see that my cousin’s small children had made her a bowl of Fruit Loops for Mother’s Day and a crayon card.
I watched an old performance of Nancy Sinatra on You Tube that made me laugh, and one of Adele at Royal Albert Hall in London that made me cry. I listened to them both several times as I folded the laundry. My artist friend posted pictures on Instagram of his exhibition that I can’t get to because it is on the other side of the world and I am home with the laundry.
For all the complaining people do about our screen saturated world, I am grateful for it. I had lost track of all these friends and family for a long time before the online world brought them back around to me.
We like to say that the door to this world stands open, so that anyone can walk in and join it. It is true that door stands open if you have a computer you can borrow internet access. It’s open if you know how to create an account, save a password and navigate all those buttons.
And then, once you enter an online forum, you have to know how to figure out how to pick your online friends, what the right thing is to say to them, and how. And what’s with all the cat pictures, anyway?
The Carson Center has recently paired with the Springfield Westfield Area office of Department of Developmental Services to create an online community for people with intellectual disabilities to learn about friendship and computer skills in a safe online environment. Which means that Stan has a job to do. He’s been hired as the online community’s first user and now its promoter. He goes in person to support programs to help his peers with developmental disabilities become online friends. He’s teaching them about all the buttons, the account settings, how to pick your friends and what kinds of things to say online. He’s already solved the mystery of the universal habit of posting pictures of cats online: we love them. And he wants his new friends to love them, too.
By JAC Patrissi
