FaceSpaceTwitRatiCkrKutUbe – Are we Online Zombies?

FaceSpaceTwitRatickrkutube - It is an acronym for Facebook, MySpace,Twitter, Technorati, Flickr, Orkut, Youtube. Now I could have written more social networks but my domain of social networking is more or less bounded within the contours of these mostly.

My usual day with the internet starts by checking responses from my friends (i.e. usual hi's & hello's) to the responses to my blog to usual twitting to keep my friends and fans upto date. Along with these checking my blog status in technorati to usual goofing around in youtube to checking my status in flickr. Also worth mentioning here is to keep myself update with the rss feeds & podcasts from my most liked bloggers and websites.

Now I can say one thing for sure i.e. I am a internet person. But more often than not i keep asking myself one question. Am I being played in the hands of these social networking sites? Now their promise of keeping me close to my friends and my foes (pun intended) at the same time is working well for them. But is social networking getting more integrated to our daily rountine?

Now some of the reasons why we like social networking sites are-

1. Arm's length reach to our friends and foes.
2. Maximum value delivered in terms of time and content.
3. Requires less attention from the content developer to content reader.

Still the questions remains in an elusive form that who is controlling whom? Are we all online social zombies trying to connect through bits & bytes? Or there can be a definite cure to this?