Have you ever felt like the distances from your loved ones and cherished connections are just too big? You then stop communicating as much, and soon your relationships are no longer what they used to be. In this day and age it needn't turn out this way. The Internet is a medium that can be used for love and friendship as well as business and information. It's not expensive to set up email and websites which gives one the means to write letters that are received instantly, send photographs digitally, and now with web cams you can even see the person live in front of you when having a conversation with voice communication.

Overseas mail can take two weeks to get to your Mother in the homeland and then another two weeks for a reply that may not get written right away. This means months for a simple conversation to take place. The telephone is useful, but it is often very pricey when compared to email and even a website. With a website you can put whole albums' of pictures on the Internet that can be accessed any time, anywhere. This means Gramps can watch the children grow week by week and have visual confirmation of all the main events in their lives.

Email is like passing notes back and forth in class, except your classroom covers our whole world. Information, cool web sites, and other tidbits can be sent as attachments, making photocopying obsolete, which saves paper, money and the time it used to take to copy text, which is now done with a button.

All this may sound a little technical but let me assure you if I can do it, anyone can. They don't create this technology for superior, genius, elite humans, (Do they even exist?) but rather for the average person. It's all structured very simply so it can become a mainstream part of our social system just as the mail service and telephone services have become in our present culture.

Specialists say the Information Age is bringing our world closer together as people share knowledge and wisdom universally like never before. But, don't believe that this is the only positive attribute of this new era. Love and friendship are now much easier to sustain and obtain as communication links become stronger, faster, and more elaborate in their depth of connection.

As well as staying in touch with people you already know, the ability to meet new friends of like mind is increasing dramatically. Through web logs, chat rooms, web sites, and on-line clubs, the feeling of being alone in life can change easily as each of us can meet people from all over the globe from the sanctity of a bedroom.

My proposal is that we turn this technical, and somewhat inhuman sounding Information Age into what it truly is-an age of universal friendship and love brought about by advanced human thinking. As the Earth shrinks in size metaphorically as humans connect and communicate more than ever in history, let it be known that we've finally reached the Age of Human. This is a time for awareness, wisdom, compassion, and love, as our evolving consciousness has brought about a new medium of interaction. Let's let the machines work for us, yet realize they are but a tool to bring our world further in human evolution.