OK friends - for my first post - a quote from a new book, one of several recent works I've read in the field of social network theory...in it, the author offers a GREAT insight to the importance and relevance of "new" technology of connecting.

Adam L. Penenberg writes in Viral Loop:

Why do we do it? What explains our BlackBerry-bearing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook friend with the need for constant connectivity? As facile as it sounds, we do it because we are hard-wired to socialize. It’s in our best interests. One reason we gravitate toward communities is because they multiply the impact of each individual to bring greater prosperity, security, and fulfillment to all. Aristotle believed that “man is a political animal” and we achieve noble actions by living as citizens together. What is politics, however, but the expression of personal interest manifested in the body politic? Two thousand years later Benedictus de Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent, expressed the view that men “are scarcely able to lead a solitary life so that the definition of man as a social animal has met with general assent; in fact, men do derive from social life much more convenience than injury.”

Perhaps the answer is even more fundamental than Aristotle, Spinoza, or other philosophers ever imagined. Social networking makes us happy and, online or off, all this congregating is merely a product of biological necessity. Research indicates that engaging with friends helps us live longer and better lives…It didn’t matter if the friends stayed in contact via phone, letter, or email. Just the fact that they had a social network of friends acted as a protective barrier.

What are your thoughts?