Michelle and Madison were under the same roof but in two different worlds. They were thousands of miles apart though only 30 feet separated them. Both sat looking at their own computer screens: Madison video-Skyping with her neighbor and a foreign exchange student, updating her Flickr account and checking her photo ratings; Michelle, her mother, updating her Facebook profile while chatting with an old high-school friend on the other coast--two people under the same roof but in two different spaces; two people bending time and space, connecting with distant people in an instant.

Our experiences of time and space are not what they used to be. Vast spaces are crossed easily through cell phones, the Internet and relatively cheap air travel. We all have become movers in our time, even when we are sitting still. Like Michelle and Madison, we are moving across space, bouncing in and out of worlds.

Technological transformation has changed the way we understand who we are and impacts and shapes our very identity--or at least the way we construct an identity.

Work and Love

Talk of identity has been a central element of youth ministry because adolescence is a time of identity formation. Sometime between the ages of 13 and 20-something, you figure out who you are. Erik Erikson believed that adolescence is a cultural period of moratorium, a kind of societal time-out. The individual needs time and space to figure out who he or she will be by figuring out what he or she does well and who he or she will love. Erikson believed the healthy person is the person who can work and love. Adolescence is the time to determine what work can be done well and who can be loved.

Erikson believed that forming the identity was somehow tied to an inner biological clock. What's interesting is that Erikson, while a great cultural observer, didn't see that his own theory was imbedded in a certain historical epoch, an epoch that radically had transformed time and space in its own right.

Erikson often is assumed to be the great modernist developmental psychologist, and a modernist he was. I don't mean modernist as a bad word, as if modernist refers old, rigid and confined. Rather, modernity had it own genius, a genius that we still happily live with today.

At its core, modernity turns our attention away from the past and toward the future. For most of human history, human life was really about assimilation of the past (past wisdom, ancient stories). To live in the present, you had to assimilate yourself to the past; to survive your "now," you would need the wisdom and maybe the spirit of your fathers. Modernity breaks this past-looking inclination and turns our chins toward the future. Modernity says, "Forget the past! The past is old (and old is bad). The future is before you; go and make a life for yourself!" While for most of human history, life was organized by what was in the past (tradition), modernity organizes life by what can be in the future.