Closeness in the wide wide web.

Being close in the wide web, every single day I communicate through Facebook with everyone online and I know that by doing so I'm closer to them even if they are in their whirlwind lives.

There was a time that, when studying communication, we were led to believe that the digital tools such as the Internet were leading us to an illusion of proximity among each other. And many times we can see the number of people that are in the list of friends on Facebook and we don't even know them personally, though we feel close to them.

Nowadays, I can observe that the proximity is only an illusion if we make usage of the tool in that way. That is, if we just use it to create the illusion of the proximity, like for example when adding people to our list of friends and that's it, not engaging in furthermore actions or connections, even if it's just to put a "like" or a sticker in a comment.

Another misusage is to replace the personal/physical encounters just by having the chats and another services of short messages on a constant use with another person. Not only that fulfills our need of communication with the other but also provides us with an excuse to not leave the daily "hamster's wheel" and actually do what we want and see someone that we really want to see. For nothing will replace a heartfelt hug.