social networking is the most important thing you can do

If you perceive social networking as a game, or waste of time, or frivolous, you are in for a rude awakening.

Social networks are the building blocks of a new organism, the latest manifestation of the collective conciousness of human beings.

As the internet was born, the first aspects of social networks took the form of irc chat rooms and email. This led to unprecidented speed and efficiency in many displaced humans sharing ideas across newly formed pathways.

Out of these rooms basic asynchronous communication developed in the form of a "forum" which allowed pathways of communication to form not only across geophysical boundaries, but now temporal ones, IE a person can join a conversation within its context with out having to be same place/same time.

By introducing ways to communicate across these pathways in non-text forms, such as posting photos, groups, fan pages, interests, changing colors, building 3d worlds, avatars etc, Social networks have introduced the latest vector across which communication paths can form.

All this is directly analgous to neural development, and since thoughts take all these kinds of forms as they move from neuron to neuron, and all the neurons are simultaneously connected in multiple dimensions, we have the unprecidented capacity to act as a single organism, a collected consiousness.

Those who choose to remain outside the collective will either be necessarily assimilated or face abandonment, just like rogue cells in a body. But the body is extremely intolerant of rogues, in that it fights their very existence for its own survival.

Interestingly though, each member or "neuron" is like no other, there is no uniformity within the neuron, only connectedness. The collective necessitates that we all remain wholly intact as we enter into it, and only expand our own individuality through the tendrils reaching to the others. This is not an oppressive utopia, it is actually the birth of our next phase of evolution, and its as unstoppable as nature itself.