The Social Being versus The Machine Being Transfer

collage by marguerita

Time that was previously spent interacting socially has increasingly been displaced by the virtual variety. A recent editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine made the timely point that social networking “encourages us to ignore the social networks that form in our non-virtual communities. … The time we spend socializing electronically separates us from our physical networks.”

From there, Dr. Sigman makes something of a leap, suggesting on the basis of no experimental evidence that virtual social networking, by way of Web sites like Facebook or Twitter, probably does not confer the same health benefits as actual, unmediated social interaction.Is Social Networking Killing You? - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com