Social Networking, Everybody's Doing It

Recently I've been on the computer a lot more than I have before. The thing is, I didn't know about all the social network sites. I was a little bored, and then all of the sudden, all these new sites hit me. There's a countless array of social networks out there. Everybody obviously heard of Facebook. I guess nowadays if you don't have it, you're pretty lame. You've also heard of YouTube. I'm almost positive that most of you go there to search for a new song, or just to see somebody do something stupid.

I thought at most we had about maybe four serious social networks out there. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and Twitter. Boy was I wrong. There's www.stumbleupon.com (one of the best sites period), www.digg.com, www.reddit.com, www.delicious.com, www.twitter.com, and the list goes on and on (HUNDREDS OF SITES). You remember the days when you could go on the internet and you would get bored after maybe about an hour? There were only so many scores I could check and so many sports articles I could read before I got bored. That problem is gone. The internet is now setup so that you don't have to leave your computer for information. Then it hit me, the world is starting to become lazy and indeed unsocial.

There's so much information on the internet about our friends and family now that we don't even ask questions anymore. Rather than calling your cousin Joe and talking to him about how his son's recital went; you say to yourself, "well that's waaaayyyy too important for him to keep that off Facebook, or maybe he'll tweet about it; I'll just wait for that". I remember when I started to go out with my girlfriend some people had the nerve to tell me that "it's not official unless it's on Facebook". ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?!? Sure social networks are great, and they do help us be more social; but we're starting to let it make us unsocial. We don't have conversations anymore because we know we could just find it on somebody's profile.

What's going to happen in the future? I was watching a "Lie To Me" episode where there was a created app on your phone. You could hold your phone up to a person, and then the app would bring up the person's profile that's in front of you. Is that how we'll get our information in the future? I'm hoping many of you don't forget about the joy of being able to speak to somebody and getting to know them the old fashion way. I don't want to be on social network sites so much that when I talk to a friend I don't know what to say since I know EVERYTHING as the result of following them on twitter.

I could go on and on about this topic, but I'll spare you from having to read so much. The point I'm trying to make is: don't let social networking make you unsocial and lazy.