Is Social Networking making us anti-social?

Don't think I don't realize the irony of the medium I chose to discuss this topic....I am fully entrenched in the social networking world. I have accounts on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and now Blogger. All these ways to communicate are available without ever leaving the comforts of my recliner.

Firstly I believe Social Networking rocks! These sites allow us to communicate with the entire country, even the entire world. We now have access to people and information that we normally would never have the opportunity to be exposed to or have a dialog with. We have the ability to fire off statements, comments and conjecture anytime of day, to anyone from our computer, laptop, cell phone or PDA. Real time ranting! We also have the ability to stay hidden behind our computer screen and comment back to incoming information only when we feel so inspired. If incoming data is not palatable, we simply delete or ignore it. This is where I think the slippery slope to anti-social behavior begins.......

Communication is made of up word choice and sentence structure as well as facial expressions, body language and intonation. The latter three items are often lost in the social networking medium. Communication requires that all parties have an area of communicative commonality. There are auditory means, such as speaking, singing and sometimes tone of voice, and nonverbal, physical means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, by using writing. There are three major parts in human face to face communication which are body language, voice tonality, and words.

According to research regarding communication (Mehrabian and Ferris. "Inference of Attitude from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels". ):
55% of impact is determined by body language--postures, gestures, and eye contact,
38% by the tone of voice, and
7% by the content or the words used in the communication process.

Given the fact that such a small % of communication sits with the actual words used, the social networking model is potentially missing many elements of effective communication. Although using the social networking sites can be time saving and enlightening, we need to make every effort to continue creating real face-to-face conversations in our lives otherwise our social skills will begin to deteriorate. Joking with someone I met recently at a seminar, we exchanged twitter account information so we could become "besties" online and never have to see each other again. A joke for sure, but the reality of this statement is scary......