This stuff is squarely not my wheelhouse but the minute you talk "internet" and "socialization" you get a whole big bunch of people saying all sortsa stuff. I made it halfway through Bowling Alone before recognizing that an 18-year-old book that hasn't so much as been revised to address, oh, I dunno, September 11 or Facebook might not be fully applicable to our modern situation.

The constellation of reading I have done leads me to support the following:

- Income inequality is socially striating and income inequality is increasing. The rate of increase is increasing.

- In-person community involvement is plummeting.

- Social engagement now happens across channels that we have no basis of understanding for. There is nothing in our social makeup that prepares us for parsing MMS for subtext. The signaling qualities of Snapchat are not homogenized. If you gave a chicken peacock feathers it would not know how to dance with them and we've whipsawed from email to IM to text to Facebook to Snapchat in the amount of time it's taken me to wear out a pair of boots.

We're spiders in space these days.

I mean, we can get the job done? But it ain't the way our parents did it and you give up on nuance when your whole environment has shifted.

I also know that when you're alone in your car everyone else is an asscamel but when you're sharing an elevator you don't make eye contact and the whole western world right now? They're alone in their car with a keyboard and an opinion.