MIT's Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, on our fear of conversation

MIT Professor Sherry Turkle was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air,  and she explained why teenagers and adults now favor texting over face-to-face conversations. During her interviews they point out  that when face-to-face

you can't control what you are going to say, and you don't know how long it's going to take or where it could go.

But that's precisely the purpose of real conversation, to learn how to read each other's emotions and develop the give and take needed for a meaningful relationship. A danger of technology is that we are losing our ability to connect with one another.

Turkle explains that face-to-face conversation teaches

skills of negotiation, of reading each other's emotion, of having to face the complexity of confrontation, dealing with complex emotion.

From a different perspective, educator Steve Wheeler in his Learning with 'e's blog post notes:

When I share my slides and blogposts under a Creative Commons licence that enables repurposing, somewhere, someone has translated my content into Spanish, opening up a huge new audience for me in Latin America. None of this would be possible without social media.

Wheeler relates his experience to what Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus* emphasizes - social networking technology connects people productively:

When we use a network, the most import asset we get is access to one another. We want to be connected to one another, a desire that ... our use of social media actually engages.

Optimally, both face-to-face conversation and social media can be effective tools to connect and collaborate with one another. 

*Shirky, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age