...Awkward...

Does anyone remember when you had to actually interact with people? You would shop in malls. Have meetings in person. Go on real dates... And what ever happened to the letter by the way? Has it really been reduced to an impermanent totally intangible thing that floats around in cyberspace in the form of an email? What did people even do before eBay, and chat rooms and, perhaps most bizarre of all, online dating (yeesh)?

If the internet has one major downfall it is that it has made all of us a little socially handicapped. Am I the only one that has noticed a startlingly sharp increase in the use of the word awkward in the last few years? I'm not going to lie, I've fallen for it too, I'm the first to call myself awkward in any social situation. Awkward Turtle? What does that even mean?

Our culture is so technologically advanced we've socially exiled ourselves from one another. I can't tell you the number of people I know on Facebook and through emailing that I hardly speak to in person...its insane! The internet has literally become a little world where people can, creepily enough, be whoever it is they want to be.

What about reality?!?

But I digress...my point is it's important that journalists find a way to preserve the humanity of the internet. Keep things real, let people know that online interaction, while perhaps a little bizarre in the grand scheme of things, is actual human contact...in a new kind of way.

By incorporating pictures, audio and video in online stories, journalists are letting their audience know that the places, events, and most importantly of all, people, in their stories are real. If a picture's worth a thousand words, and a video is essentially a lot of moving picture, and you add to that words and sometimes audio as well- I think its safe to say we're doing all we can to keep it as real as possible.

We're appealing to emotions and after all, even if each of us across the globe is locked in a room by ourselves with inaccurate and incredibly skewed perceptions of who we really are due to lack of social interaction - we still have emotion. As long as we can keep that consistent in our writing, stir passion and feeling within our readers, then we should be okay. Awkward...but okay.