Over a recent re-viewing of a movie trailer entitled “Her”, I began to wonder. The film centers around a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with a women. Well the voice of one at least, a computer operating system that interacts with their user in a analytically designed manner.

This made me wonder, with all the conversation going on regarding a more personal and customized approach to online marketing and targeting of consumers is this where we are headed? At what point does are online world become more important than our real world? Consumers are putting more and more of their lives online and businesses are taking note. Never before have companies had the ability to create such effective targeting of consumers using this data. And we love it, I mean if you speak to most consumers they relish in the fact that they can find whatever they what online and are alerted to the fact that their favorite store is having a massive sale.

There are hundreds of thousands of stats that will describe how we are constantly connected, but more effective would be for you to just look around in a 5 foot radius and count the devices that are present. People can witness pictures of the greens of the Amazon or the colorful mosaic of fishes in the Great Barrier Reef from Twitter or Facebook, and all from the comfort of their favorite recliner.

If there is a point to be made her it is that I fear we would rather communicate through a technological medium. Why not, it’s safe, it’s comfortable, and most of all it’s easy; we do not have to experience anything now because some one else has. At what point do we have to create moderation, when I was a kid there were television ads to tell me to stop watching TV. Is this the business or government groups responsibility to help make a change?

In my final though I believe that changes need to be made, we have begun to view people on our social media profiles as faceless tiles. We have “learned” all we need to know about someone before we can truly discover a person. I don’t mean to bash social media, it does good, I mean it has allowed my mother to see her sister over 12000km away in Sydney, Australia. Social media has allowed us to connect with our World like never before in human history, but has it separated us from our neighbors?