Text Messaging in Yosemite

Over the July 4th holiday weekend, I went to Yosemite National Park for the better part of a day. While taking the short walk from a parking and bus area to the majestic lower falls, I saw a college-aged woman totally engaged in text messaging while sitting on a rock fence on the side of the trail. My wife remarked, “I guess that even in the face of overwhelming natural beauty, social relationships are still more important.” I wanted to know more about what this young woman was text messaging—if she was texting a friend about the waterfall she had just seen, is her text message really that different that John Muir’s diary entries as he lived and worked in virtually the same spot she was writing from? She might also have been texting about something totally unrelated to Yosemite, in which case I suppose my wife was right.