Social Networking vs IRL meetings

Today, I received a Xing message from a former colleague at Nycomed/Altana Pharma. It was nice, because he did not send a simple connect request, but a longer message that also contained some interesting thoughts on social networking.

This, in turn, made me think of a phenomenon I could observe over the last 2 days. My son (age 16) spend quite some time video-chatting with a female class-mate. The interesting thing is that the walking distance is just 10 minutes.

Clearly, social networking can enable reconnects with old friends. The "cheers to absent friends" might become less frequent, if you can connect them remotely. I use Skye, Facebook etc. to keep in touch.

On the other hand, social networking on the net also has a potential to change social patterns. Instead of visiting each other, we could chat or skype. This reminds me of the book Robots and Empire by Isaac Asimov, in which the human spacer branch lives more or less individually and IRL visits are kept at a minimum.

Well, regarding my son, I believe that there's no overly risk that he will totally disappear into the online world, as long as he can't sit there with his friends and have a beer. :-)