One thing I might posit, though I’d probably need a whole book to prove it, is that technologies like texting, instant messenging and facebook-like sites, while fantastic ways of delivering incremental bits of information, do little to actually bring people closer together.

Texting, for example, is a fantastic way to communicate to someone without actually speaking to them. It is inherently a very limited and mostly non-interactive method of communication. Now, maybe you have a reason for not just calling them, but a lot of those reasons are sort of negative, eg. don’t want to chat right now, don’t have the time, person talks forever, I just want to tell them this one thing, etc… A lot of the reasons for narrowing personal communications bandwidth have nothing to do with increasing the quality of a relationship.