Not long ago, there were still newspaper articles about the possibility of “Internet addiction,” a “disease” that kept people on the web all day and all night, and isolated them from other people. Children were especially prone to it, and all sorts of advice was given on how to get your child off the Internet.
How quickly we forget. Now the Internet is all about socializing. On one site, Second Life (www.secondlife.com),� you can play a game where you are an avatar in an entirely different created world. This simulated world has real estate deals,newspapers, and retail stores, many of them transposed from our “first life” to this new world.
Less complete, but more compelling, are the worlds created by such sites as Facebook, MySpace,and a new one for Baby Boomers that I’m beta testing called TeeBeeDee.
These new sites, along with the ones that facilitate photosharing, and the millions of blogs kept by everyone from Arianna Huffington to Katie Couric to yours truly ,
have created a new category called Social Media.