If You're Not Online, Do You Exist?
When I was young, meeting someone new was uncomplicated. You saw another kid, asked if they wanted to play, and a friendship began. Growing up in a pre-internet world, the people you knew were largely the people you saw regularly. You had each other's phone numbers, and that was enough. Connection happened through proximity. There was a time, further back in history, when formal letters of introduction served as the mechanism for entering new social and professional circles, but that practice faded long ago. Today, the introduction happens online, often before any in-person meeting ever takes place.
About twenty-one years ago I made a trip to New Hampshire. I was a full-time minister at the time and was exploring the possibility of becoming a bivocational minister in that state, with the goal of finding steady work while using my remaining time to plant a Brazilian congregation. When I arrived, I already had a contact: a Brazilian man I had connected with online. He and his American wife were warm and generous hosts. One evening he accompanied me to visit a church where I had a separate point of contact. I overheard the two of them comparing notes on how they each knew me. They were both struck by the same discovery: they had each met me online, independently, before ever meeting me in person. At the time that felt unusual enough to be worth remarking on. It would barely register today.
Fast forward more than a decade. I was working at Viacom in New York when a teammate received word that he was being laid off. He was a strong contributor and did not deserve to be shown the door, but layoffs rarely operate on merit. I told him I was sorry and asked to connect with him on LinkedIn so we could stay in touch professionally. He told me he did not have a LinkedIn profile and had never set one up. He had been in his role long enough that the thought had simply never occurred to him. I remember feeling genuinely concerned on his behalf. Not just about the layoff, but about what the absence of a professional online presence would mean for what came next.
That concern has only deepened over the years. There are people I knew in high school I would genuinely like to reconnect with, or at minimum learn something about where life took them. But they are not on Facebook, not on LinkedIn, not findable through any of the usual channels. It is a strange kind of invisibility. They exist, of course, but in the digital landscape that now mediates so much of how we maintain and build relationships, their absence makes them effectively unreachable.
The way we build and maintain relationships has changed fundamentally, and there is no returning to the earlier model. Professional networking, personal reconnection, community building, and even the early stages of friendship now flow through digital channels as a matter of course. This does not mean that online connection is shallow or insufficient. Some of the most meaningful professional relationships in my own life began with a message or a comment thread before they ever became a conversation. What it does mean is that opting out of digital presence carries a real cost, one that is easy to underestimate until the moment you need your network and discover it does not know where to find you. In a world where so much begins online, being present and intentional about how you show up digitally is no longer optional. It is simply part of how relationships work now.
