The New Yorker looks at MySpace

In a New Yorker article entitled Social Studies, Michael Schulman reports, with some amusement and some bemusement, on Facebook in the Flesh, a seminar at N.Y.U. aimed at introducing students face-to-face who had previously only known each other via Facebook.

The subtext here is that kids these days are so used to connecting virtually that they need remedial help when confronted with flesh and blood. I'm a bit old to have caught the Facebook wave (though I am LinkedIn), but one is never too old to remember the skin-crawling awkwardness that many freshmen -- geekly or not -- experience in those first crucial days.

Combine that with a small, self-selected sample of 35 freshmen out of around 5,000 and it's hard to say what valid conclusions, if any, one might draw. It's still an interesting article, though.