Social Media: "solution to" or "symptom of" modern life?

Today Facebook announced their 'listen to music with your friends' feature.  The idea is to listen to the same music while you are on Facebook with your friend.  While listening to the music, you can also chat about the music in real time.  You can read more about that from Facebook blog.

Now you can DJ for your friend while you are Facebooking;
time to set up a virtual house party!  :-)

That's almost like meeting up with someone in a cafe or something.  You can listen to the same music, and talk about things including a song that happens to be on.

That's the power of social media.  You don't have to be in the same place to be together in virtual environment. You can have video chat with someone, thanks to Google Hangouts and Facebook Skype Video chat.  You can listen to a same music at the same time as if you are sitting next to each other.  It removes location constraint from having real-time social interaction with someone.

But is that all good?  You can ask your teenage daughter or niece.  She'll more likely respond to you with a text.  Average teenage girl sends about 4,050 texts per month (as of Oct 2010), and number of text messaging has been growing.  New generation is growing up on virtual social interaction.  Instead of calling, they are pinging.  Instead of hanging out, they are using Hangouts.

It's not just teenagers.  Those of us who are blessed with jobs have been working extra hours to fill in for lost headcounts during 2008 downturn.  Now that we carry around portable computers (called smartphones) even to our bedrooms, we are always connected and reachable on social media.  And this constant presence in virtual environment is taking bigger chunk of our day each year, leaving little time to be hang out with people around you, especially with our family.

So the question might be that "is social media a solution to our busy modern life, or is it a symptom of unbalanced virtual life style?"