What are you doing, RIGHT NOW???

So I doubt anything I say will be something you haven't thought about before, but I wanted to at least put my spin on things. I bought an iPod Touch last week (shameless plug, but I highly recommend it), and it has led me to being online even more than usual. It's not the iPhone, where you can almost literally have an internet connection anywhere; it can only hit wifi hot spots. Still, it makes me feel like I am even more connected than I have ever been.

And that's what I want to talk about, this "connectedness" (to coin a word) that we all have nowadays. I mean, I'm 26, only eight years out of high school. That time has flown by, but really, in the grand scheme of things eight years is not that much. But I think about how relating to people has changed in those eight years and it's almost amazing.

In 2001 "chatting" online was still cool - as in, actual chat rooms, on AOL, or Yahoo, or whatever. Instant messenging was around, but probably still not done by a majority of people - only high schoolers and college kids. Still, it was not the main way we communicated with people. Even high schoolers still used the phone for the most part. Not cell phones, land lines. I think I had two friends with cell phones, and that's it. Texting had not even become an option yet.

Now look at where we are today. We don't even chat or IM with people in real-time anymore. It's almost like we've regressed in that sense. Now, we have Facebook to take its place. Obviously Facebook is more advanced than IM conversations ever were. We literally post every bit of information about our lives on there. If we take a trip, and have pictures to prove it, it's on Facebook within the hour. People find out if you've started or ended a relationship with someone simply by looking at your profile.

Facebook has also, in ways, become the determining factor in whether you are "accepted" by someone or a group of people. Now I know there are plenty of people out there that pad their friend lists with people they just randomly meet in class and then never talk to again. I'm talking about the people you meet and actually expect to see and spend time with sometime in the future. Once you have looked at each other's profiles, and add each other as "friends", you know it's acceptable to talk to them/contact them/whatever. Of course, that interaction no doubt eventually happens on Facebook, not face to face or on the phone.

Then of course there's Twitter. It takes Facebook statuses (stausii?) to a whole new level. I mean, we are already to the point where Facebook status updates now consist of "_____ is fixing dinner and then watching TV!". And I'm not saying that I'm not guilty of it. But now you have Twitter come along, and almost everything you do is summed up in 140 characters. When people start posting status updates, or tweets, from the bathroom, on their iPhone or Blackberry or whatever... you wonder if a line has been crossed.

So in all this rambling I'm not really sure I have a point. I guess the point is, we are more connected than ever. We now constantly know what each other is doing, almost 24/7. Where does it go from here? Will it get to the point where our every move and action is not only told to the world, but also GPSed so people know our exact location as well? That's already happening in ways. It's not scary to me, really. I'm just anxious to see where this all goes next.