Angelo Racoma wrote an excellent piece at Performancing on how the web affects our social skills in the offline world. His point is that it makes us shy to meet people face to face and kind of lazy about actually communicating with folks. I tried posting the following comment, but it didn’t work…

“I’ll bet that’s why there are so many web-oriented conferences! BlogWorld Expo, Web 2.0, SMX series, SES Series, WebmasterWorld Pubcon, AdTech, Affiliates4U, Traffic, TechCrunch 40, … People want to connect with their friends for real!

“I’ve been on both sides of this …  as someone who was really shy on the phone, MSN allowed me to develop friendships I might not have been able to create, otherwise. Also, I accidentally learned to type fast through IM conversations, as a friend and I had fast exchanges and I wanted to keep up and get my whole point across before he interrupted (MSN limited your character-per-message count). I type a lot faster today than when I started and without looking at the keys.

“That said, my ex-gf and I broke up in part because I hated talking on the phone, all the more so when I had nothing to say. In hindsight, I realize that a lot of my time as a kid was spent ‘socializing’ online via forums and MSN, and even today I do lots of Facebook, Twitter etc. I wonder if that didn’t in fact handicap me in relation to how I communicate with certain people who’ve had a different upbringing.”