In the burgeoning world of communications more people are communicating with more people than ever before; there are a myriad of data streams to dip into. This new reality of status updates, tweets, blog entries, photostreams, skyping, texting, emails, etc. has been described in terms that Teilhard de Chardin would understand. He imagined that the next great leap in cosmic evolution is already underway with the transformation of matter into consciousness. And with all those messages bouncing all around the world 24 hours a day, it’s not difficult to imagine the earth as a pulsating sphere of intelligibility.

As you read this entry, it’s entirely possible that right this moment a teenager in Calcutta is finding out some tidbit of information about the terrible earthquake in Haiti from an online Israeli friend’s re-tweet of a text message originally sent to CNN Atlanta by a would-be investigative journalist in Poughkeepsie, NY – who in turn heard about the disaster news from a graduate school colleague on an immersion trip to Port-au-Prince. The Indian teenager’s never been to Haiti, never experienced an earthquake, has no idea where Upstate New York starts and the Bronx ends, and has never heard of immersion trips, and yet she’s part of the global web of communication and like all of us she is actively decoding and recoding the messages she receives and sends out.

Who are we are all this? Creators and movers of important data? Encouraging and supportive siblings? Love-stricken in a relationship ‘friends’? Instigators of career-ending rumors? Bewildered and overwhelmed students of life? Paid employees seeking promotion? Perpetrators of voyeurism? Prayerful companions on distant journeys? Sponsors of addiction recovery? Voices of justice and peace?

We are all in the midst of enacting so many roles as we intersect, spin, and divert countless psychic strands of information throughout our complexifying networks of contacts. Each of the messages has varying bandwidths of importance, ignorance, knowledge, and emotion.

What are the patterns of your own collaborative communications?

Do they tend to relate more to one aspect of your identity than to others? If there was a way to gain an overall picture of how your communication impacted the world, what image would emerge? What would be the emergent causes, issues, values, communities, languages, emotions, or symbols inherent in your daily communications?

Whether we are able to admit to it or not, we are already collaborative communicators. We participate actively in the construction of communicative social realities, especially when we dip into the web of global information exchange. Even if we are not intentional about how we do this, we can and do have an impact on the lives of others.

Our ongoing vocational discernment might include some reflection in this area. “What is the nature and impact of my collaborative communication?” “What rolls do I tend to play in the global information exchange?” “Who do I communicate with and why?” “What is the content of my contribution?”