Blogging to Keep Families Connected

Just decades ago, the internet wasn’t even a thought. Now, the internet is the most common means of communication. When loved ones were in the military and stationed overseas, the only way they were able to keep in touch with family and friends was to hand write letters. For someone with a big family, writing individual letters to each family member could be tedious and time consuming. Now, within minutes, they can type up a letter and with one click of a button, the message is sent to all family and friends.

My brother went to the United States Naval Academy and when he graduated, he was stationed in Japan for two years, then the Gulf, and is now in South Korea. Phone calls are very costly and would reach only one or two at a time; and with the major time difference it makes it very difficult to keep in touch. So my brother decided to open his own blog. He wrote about the many sites he got to see while he was in other countries. At least once a week, he gave us an update on his life and the things that were going really well for him and the things that he had concerns about. We really got to experience his heart instead of what he could have shared in a 2 minute conversation from a bad connection in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The whole family was able to read his blog and feel as if we were right there with him, experiencing all of it together. He took a trip to Nikko and posted this picture:

It looks like a gorgeous place. My brother's blog created a way of central communication between him and the family. We were able to comment on the things that he wrote and discuss it with the rest of the family. Without my brother's blog, we may have had to wait long periods of time for a phone call, that we would risk missing if we were not home at the time he called. We wouldn't have had such a great way to keep in touch with his new experiences in a new place.