Yes, sometimes technology can deepen our isolation and create new problems. But my own experience with the internet is that it can be an extraordinary means of fostering deeper human interconnection on a global scale.

This wonderful video illustrates the point beautifully:

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2539741

So here we are on chess.com, playing a 1,400-year-old game. Here I am, playing chess with a young man in Uzbekistan, a computer programmer in Great Britain, a woman in Kansas, a teenager in Germany, a jazz singer in New York, a father in Algeria, a restauranteur in Toronto... the list goes on, and mine is probably a pretty typical chess.com Friends list.

It makes me think that for all the challenges we face in the here and now, ours is not an altogether bad age in which to be alive.