I have not been a fan of the web 2.0 concept and social networking as the tidal wave of the future.

I know. MySpace had 55 million users in February and Facebook had 20 million. (Nielsen ratings) So what’s your point? Go along with the crowd? I don’t think so.

If you are on Facebook you can use “Flickr” to list the movies you like and then the other 19,999,999 people on the service can see what you liked and give you a “hot or not”. Great. Another popularity contest. An internet push toward conformity, toward going along. Just what we need.

You can’t list independent films. Maybe we should fix that.

But … just the other day, the New York Times (when it wasn’t busy covering the latest yellow journalistic scandal) found time to report on a study that says that 7 out of 10 people who are deprived of their cell phones and internet connections become depressed. Those seem like highly repeatable scores. We could all probably agree that those are reasonable numbers. But so?

About the same time, the Financial Times (really probably consistently the best newspaper today) reported on a study about loneliness. The researcher had concluded that perhaps the feeling of loneliness is a darwinian mechanism to drive us into groups because humanity needs community and the opportunities for specialization that communities offer in order to survive and thrive. Someone said something like: “it takes a village … “

How interesting is the combination of these two reports? Maybe the blossoming of social networks — via cell phones, text messages, and internet sites — is really driven by some biological/genetic force that is bigger than all of us.

I may have to take all of this a little more seriously.