Social networking is a tool of the devil made for cowards and narcissists.

Now, don’t think I’m a total Luddite.  Social networking has become the great equalizer of the 21^st century.  You Tube provides a virtually unlimited audience to the talented; it also attracts the terminally stupid who find infamy (but no fortune) in the parade of idiotic stunts.  More job-seekers find employment through Facebook connections than by shot-gunning e-mail résumés.  The Egyptian people used Twitter to communicate after the government shut down the Internet.

But social networking has its dark side.

GM did a commercial for the Chevy Cruze. Boy drops off girl in front of her apartment; they exchange a quick kiss.  He drives off in his Cruze and summons the Online Genie, asking for his Facebook update. The result (in a woman’s voice, naturally) is, “Best first date…ever.” What?  You couldn’t tell him that to his face?  And he didn’t have the balls to ask you, “So, whaddya think?”

My 19-year old nephew broke up with his girlfriend via text messaging. That is tacky but more distressing was – neither one of them saw anything wrong with this! Texting, Twittering, Facebooking and all the other “verbified” means of communication are creating a generation of morons deathly afraid of interpersonal relationships and rejection.  It reminds me a book in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot series; people lived alone, tens or hundreds of miles apart, communicating only via what we call webcams, as actual physical contact had become culturally unacceptable.

Several people I knew in the past as actual flesh-and-blood humans have “friended” me but substituted Facebook posts, pokes, nudges, winks, whatever, for e-mail, but we still interact. It’s a great way to show your friends pictures of the human or canine grandchildren or your vacation halfway around the world, or to commiserate about how your adult children who haven’t matured are driving you to drink.  In other words, our relationship is still a dialog.

But Facebook Fanatics rave about the hundreds or thousands of “friends” they have; friends who wouldn’t know you from Mickey Mouse if they ran into you on the street.  Or, as Wiley Miller observed:

Life is rough and relationships require constant work.  Sometimes one gets hurt, but sometimes one finds reward far greater than ever imagined.  I’ve been through both; what doesn’t kill you really makes you stronger. But a real friendship goes two ways.  That’s what friends are for.