What's wrong with the F2F.....

Social networks and cell phones... you and I may find these technologies sacrosanct, but for kids getting weaned on this stuff, relationships in the real world may be suffering badly.

With the average teen sending or receiving over 2,000 text messages a month and spending nine hours a week on social networking sites, experts are worried that in-person, face-to-face social interaction is beginning to take a back seat to this twitchy, impersonal, and detached form of communication. The problem: When people rely exclusively on short bursts of written communication, those doing the texting miss out on the subtleties that come with a verbal and (especially) face-to-face discussion.

As the Wall Street Journal suggests, looking at a smiley face in an email isn't the same as seeing an actual smile on an actual face, and text-addicted teens are simply failing to learn the intricacies of bodily cues like eye movement and physical motion, not to mention all the nuance that comes with verbal conversation, cues which are learned only though a lifetime of practice in the read world. The result: Many fear we are raising a generation of kids who simply can't carry on a conversation -- or even look another person in the eye.

Of course, teens aren't the only ones susceptible to this problem. As the linked story above notes, even work environments -- where technology is a critical part of getting your job done -- are struggling with the effects of laptops and cell phone messaging during the work day. The most noteworthy effect is that most meetings with more than a couple of attendees have become all but useless, as workers spend the entire time checking their phones and tapping away on Facebook, virtually ignoring the person standing at the whiteboard across the room. Now being called "continuous partial attention," the problem is now being combated by simply banning all technology from meeting rooms, much to the likely anger of those who attend the meetings.

The scary thing is that no one knows how severe the problem really is. This phenomenon is relatively new on the sociological time scale, and even attempting to study how a reliance on written messaging leads to real-world detachment is fraught with difficulty. As the WSJ notes, by the time a study could be put together to analyze the situation, any technology investigated would have changed again, making the study outdated before it was ever published.

Maybe it's just a phase? God help us.

WHOA....

Can you imagine what this world would be without a face to face conversation, real touch, feelings.....well I think we better understand that in life we really need each other...not just to communicate our ideas but to translate our humanity...I know with fear being so primal..and people assume the worst before they think about what real reasons they feel a certain way..

like the health care debate..here are these large corps elisting soldiers to fight their fight. Health care is a buisness and these guys dont like competition.they are very effective in getting in your face because nobody thinks rationally when someone is being confortational. I want to shut down or throw a punch. oooooo...that sensationalism that would look good on the networks I own and wow I can make more money from the advertisers...one big circle of corporate greed and profit off us...

when will we ever get angry enough....I am.

but to make a point we need to communicate essentially face to face to commune with others of like and unlike minds...sure texting and email is communicating but talking face to face shares the human element to all communications, and maybe we can calm fear, maybe we can really listen to each other and maybe we can really communicate the truth.