Still, each “advance” has allowed more and more complex relationships in those times when when we’re not physically close.

On the good/bad, progress/regress spectrums, social media seems to have expanded both sides of the slash. I’ve met kids and overzealous entrepreneurs who friend everyone they meet and failed to develop true relationships. I know seniors, oddballs, and other socially marginalized people who’ve found deep connections–and defeated loneliness.

First things first, to say that grooming is a downgrade from speech is presumptuous in its own right and I very much doubt your claim that an intelligent cultural critic would make such an assertion. This is similar to the fallacy that evolution is a mechanism of progress, when in reality it is only a mechanism of change. We like to perceive these things as progress because we are naturally self centered, but there is no objective truth here. Every generation decries the cultural change which inevitably occurs in their lifetime as a degradation, only to have the next do the same, but yet we somehow all look back on the past with the sense that we have made progress. Curious that.

However, it may be fair to say that social media combines grooming (physical touching and visibility into activity) and speech at a fantastic scale. I’m connected to people who I care about on a daily basis that would have been untenable two decades ago. I am familiar with the cadence and rhythm of their daily life just as much as I am the major arcs of tragedy and triumph they face. This is more powerful and more sophisticated than political revolution to me.

How sad that people find connecting with their friends and family to be so much work. That hasn’t been my experience, which is mildly ironic since it is my actual job.

The other aspect of social media that intelligent people flock to are its applications in marketing: you tweet hashtags because it makes you an “expert” in social media and the amount of your followers will make it easier for you to land that consulting gig / get that promotion in your advertising agency (or you get the job directly via your twitter).
In other words: social media is *work*. That’s why there are services such as Buffer (http://bufferapp.com/) that help you automate your “social interactions with others”. Makes perfect sense for a business that simulates real world sharin’ n’ carin’, but the sad reality is that individuals use it just the same, especially when there’s no clear difference between work and play anymore.

TL;DR: social media isn’t fun, it’s work.

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