Hey WSJ, Socializing Can't Replace Social Networks Either
In the August 6,7 weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, an article by Jonah Lehrer was published titled, Social networks Can't Replace Socializing. His argument is that now with the addition of another social network, Google+, don't we have enough online sharing? Shouldn't we go back to socializing in person?
While I agree that, of course, we should do both, would we really ever want to go back to a world without online socializing? A world in which we, for the most part, were limited to interacting with only people that lived in the same small geographical region that we did.
Our world, and even more importantly, the world of our youth, has completely opened up. We meet and get to know people from all parts of the world. We interact with people from different age groups, nationalities, races, religions and geographic areas in ways that would never happen in real life.
There are often networking opportunities to meet your online friends in person. I've attended many meetups and conference, some in New York, where I live, and some that I've traveled to attend, and had a chance to meet my online friends, many of which I probably never would have been friends with without the Internet.
This is a new world and like it or not, most of our daily transactions are going to be conducted online in the future, if they aren't already. As much time as teens spend on social networks, they still socialize in real life every day in school. Adults have all had plenty of practice socializing before social networks. It is the people that don't have experience using social networks that are going to have trouble living in a connected world.
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