A few years back, I wrote a guest blog post for Blah Blah Tech about how face-to-face beats phone, beats IM, beats email…my original post was written not long after I joined Twitter (June 2007) but certainly quite some time before social networking had really gone mainstream and so this nice graphic brings us up to date by pointing out where Twitter and Facebook site in the heirarchy and expands on my thoughts: 10 Levels of Intimacy in Today’s Communication.

I am reminded often of the lyrics to the Kate Bush song, Deeper Understanding:

“As the people here grow colder
I turn to my computer
And spend my evenings with it
Like a friend…”

Ironically, at the time she wrote that song, very few people were connecting with other people via their computers and the implication was that the worrying displacement of human contact by machine intelligence was her concern. Today, we can connect with many more people than ever before. Just remember to ignore that inane twitter update or email from your bank when you’re having a conversation with real people in the pub.