Now days if you ask a 20-something how life is, they are liable to tell you within the first two sentences something about their virtual online life.
One modern-day anthropologists and sociologists have noted that teenage boys would rather have an excellent profile on Facebook than own a car.
Previously, teenage boys wanted to get a driver's license and car as possible so they could attract a girlfriend.
Today, it's easier to attract a girlfriend by having a nice profile and high status on the social networking site.
So, what will the future of social networking be? It is certainly changing the way we live, and everyone is affected, even if they aren't on the social networks themselves.
Those who aren't may feel left out, and they're often rebuffed during conversational periods as everyone else is busy playing with their personal tech devices, and tuned out to reality (one-foot-in and one-foot-out), and into the virtual world straddling between the two realities and those who still living only in the real world, are finding themselves the minority.
In the future of social networking things will be even more integrated and you could live vicariously through an avatar in the virtual world and/or through augmented reality - a place where it might seem just as real and certainly realer than any videogame today.
That's where we are headed, and most everyone who's involved in the industry and is watching the rapid deployment of these technologies believes that, so do I.
There was an interesting article recently on Tech Crunch Online News titled; "Four Perspectives On Augmented Reality and Its Future," by Alex Williams, posted on November 25, 2012.
It was surely an interesting dialogue well worth reading.
A few of the participants in the discussion described the potential eventuality where folks might lose their sight on reality as augmented reality became far too interesting and therefore folks stopped participating in the real world.
Yes, all interesting comments, however, consider that in a way; isn't this already happening with the advent of social networks and the internet? Consider how fast all this technology has come at us, and how it has changed our society, not just in the US, but globally as well, and it continues to expand throughout the world every day, soon, everyone will be online with no "digital divide" and then what happens to human productivity, or human life for that matter? The changes so far have been drastic, what comes next could really shake up our reality, think about that? Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.