Breeding Lucidity: Google away human contact!

I consider myself to be reasonably tech-savvy. Fine, I cannot spew out the technical specifications of my phone. But I say, that's what the "about" option is for. I do take on to gadgets pretty quickly in terms of operational skills. However, I do get bored of them slightly easily. And it is more prominent in everything that's to do with the internet. I prefer the feeling of paper between my fingers to reading books online. Therefore, I never took to e-books. I thought I was pretty in with the social networking phenomenon till they decided to unleash their spawn on to the world wide web. First it was just Orkut and Facebook on one hand and blogs on the other. Then suddenly specialists in each function came forth and then they decided to connect everything to everything else. So I can read something in the far corners of the internet and then tell my friends via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (there's always screenshot, smartarse!), and . Yes, we all like to be connected. That's definitely how we prevent the realisation of our ultimate fear - loneliness. I will not re-hash the argument of how much is too much when it comes to staying connected and social networking. I posted this something short on the same quite a while ago. I still stand by the idea that social networking these days is an excess of networking and an unforgivable neglect of "social". I must sound like an old hag who is against everything modern and world changing. But why do we have this insane need to be connected with everyone all the time? Of course, we all want an audience. We all believe that every word that comes out of us has to be recorded for posterity for such wisdom doesn't just appear as a ray of light from the heaven's above for everyone all the time! That is exactly my point. It needs to be sparse. It needs to be relevant. It needs to be, most importantly, informative. In the current situation, anyone can piece together a person's life from a few clicks on the internet. What is the harm is someone knowing which school I went to? What is the harm in someone knowing what my favourite breakfast cereal is? My biggest issue with it all is that as human beings we are primed to avoid uncertainty. If we are going to meet someone, or receive a mail from someone, our first instance now is to Google them. Why? Because we know that Google will tell us something about them. We can create our first impression of them. It could be a wonderful résumé on LinkedIn or a photo from the party that you would never want to speak about again. The impression has been made. Without meeting the person, without knowing the person. Maybe the impression that you do form of the person before meeting turns out to be true. He sure is a party animal. She sure loves her clothes. However, the element we are missing out on is discovering these things through personal contact. Things written on paper are just that, things on paper. In this busy world, it makes sense to know more about people beforehand so that we can "weed out" the ones that don't seem to fit the bill. That is the allegedly logical reason. Of course we cannot waste any more time because we are busy Googling the next prospect.