The Internet.

A year ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave this address on internet freedom. The gist of her speech is this: open up access to the Internet and you open people's minds and eyes. She cited events like the "birth of citizen journalism" during the 2009 elections in Iran to point out that social media websites - like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube - can be used to open channels of communication when a government is trying to restrict what information gets passed around.

With these kinds of websites, you're putting the "means of production" and distribution of information into the hands of the masses. Anyone with a video-capable camera or cellphone - quite a sizable number of people - can create videos, upload them to a site like YouTube, and share them with an effectively global audience. Anyone with access to the Internet can create a "tweet" on Twitter and share information as banal as what they ate for breakfast or as shocking as the fact that police opened fire on demonstrators. There is an unimaginably large quantity of information getting thrown around out there on the Internet, and I'd argue that the majority of it comes through unofficial channels; while official institutions like the New York Times or the government make lots of information available, the sum total of unofficial sources of information on the Internet - like Facebook status updates, YouTube videos like this one, and my own blog - is immeasurable. We're all putting lots and lots of information out there, and consuming lots and lots of information, and we're using sites where we control the content. Even official institutions like Foreign Policy magazine's site now create forums where we average folk leave comments on their articles.

Put simply, we are an essential part of the information flow happening on the Internet. We're not just passive consumers, but rather we are active producers. As Marshall McLuhan put it way back in 1975, "At the moment of Sputnik the planet became a global theater in which there are no spectators but only actors." Interestingly enough, this is actually the title of the article in which he elaborates this idea, but the idea is just as true today if we replace "Sputnik" with "the Internet." As users of online social media, we're all interconnected and we're all creating, be it a new profile picture or a Prezi. In spite of the fact that using the Internet doesn't require you to get up off your couch except to pee and grab a coke from the fridge, participating in Internet culture (which you, dear reader, are actively doing while reading my blog) is an active experience.

I know, dear reader, that this is nothing new to you. "Duh, Grace," you're thinking. "That's pretty obvious. Tell me something I don't know."

What I want to point out is that even though the Internet is making us more and more connected all the time, I think for the average user, online social media is used to reinforce concrete human relationships rather than to forge new ones. For example, my friend Adam shared this video with me this morning in a face-to-face interaction, and then ten hours later, I turned around and shared it with another friend, Jourdan, again in a face-to-face interaction. My relationships with these two people began in the real world, and the social media was used to reinforce those relationships. Further, I think that for the average user, more often than not, social networking sites don't really expand her actual social sphere. The people I interact with through the Internet are people I already know in concrete contexts. I don't think most of us go out looking for new friends on the web. I'm not online looking for new Facebook friends in Vietnam so I can keep up with the political scene there. Rather, I think most of us use social media to solidify and expand on relationships that exist offline.

Of course, we all hear the "horror stories" of sketchy liaisons between people who meet through social networking sites. Just think of this Fall's film Catfish or for my Mormon readers the story Elder Bednar shared in his May 2009 CES Fireside about the couple who met and married on Second Life.

But that's not what the vast majority of us are using the Internet for. We might keep up with the news online, we might stream Jónsi concerts from NPR, and we might even publish blogs to which we want to attract a large readership of people we don't know, like my friend Tristan does. However, for most of us, we want to establish and maintain human relationships in "unmediated" contexts - in face-to-face interactions with real human beings - rather than in "mediated" ones in which we can only get our hands on 13" plastic boxes and stare into LED screens rather than human eyes.

Online social media helps us reinforce human relationships but doesn't replace them. There's something about breathing the same air as the person you're communicating with - gauging their reactions to you by their body language and tone of voice, making eye contact, sharing a meal. All that is largely lost online. Maybe this comes back to my recent preoccupation with sensuality and my fear of feeling increasingly alienated from my own physical body. I want sensation: sight, smell, sounds, touch, taste. And I'm not going to find that online. Even as I write this blog post - which I hope will generate some conversation within my own preexisting social circle in real face-to-face contexts - I find myself forgetting about my body and wiggle my toes to remind myself that they're still there.

Real face-to-face relationships in my tangible body - I guess that's what I'm after.

Final note: please don't think I'm a Luddite. I'm all about online social media. I think Clinton has a point - online social media is a great way to circumvent government censorship and promote understanding between people who wouldn't otherwise be able to connect. I just want to remind myself - and you all, while I'm at it - about how important our relationships are with the physical world and the other people who inhabit it.