Alone Together -modern madness

Twitter and Facebook don't connect people – they isolate them from reality.

The US is obsessed with the merits of social networking.

Sherry Turkle appeared on The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.