Now, I really don't like to focus on the very beginning of a reading assignment, but it was the subject matter of the first few pages that really caught my attention. It was the whole, "What do people gain from virtual communities that keeps them sharing information with people they might never meet face to face?" in Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs.
Rheingold was discussing that matter with a friend of his who works for Microsoft up in Washington state. It is people like these, these innovators, who are responsible for the ability to collect social capital without looking a new "friend" or colleague in the eye.
I definitely appreciate the ability to meet new people, find people with similar interests and connect with them, and have the chance to purchase books from people I never really want to meet who live in states miles and miles away. My mom always told me never to talk to strangers, on the other hand. Isn't it dangerous to trust people with my contact and/or billing information when I don't know the first thing about them? Is all this innovation taking away from the relationships that could be built and time that could be spent talking in coffee shops instead of email? How can you learn to respect someone without ever hearing the tone of their voice, or seeing if they can hold eye contact?
Social capital is very important, but we should remember that we will always need human interaction to keep us from becoming robots.
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I Think anything new seems really dangerous. when I read your post I remembered some of my old relatives when they were dealing with PC. They were so careful and almost afraid from this new tech that they use for the first time.
It is not easy to trust people in real life, so I think it wont be easy to trust them in the "cyber life".
I believe they are a lot of honest people but also there are a lot of corrupted individuals who really did bad things made people trust nobody.
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