social interaction online as compared to interaction in physical reality

A while ago I was thinking alot about social networking. Facebook, myspace, ect. in regard to how it affects the way we communicate in real life. Today I randomly started thinking about it again, and I've been thinking that it might have more negative effects than we realize. I'm not talking about issues of saftey as in do you really know who you are talking too, I think all of us are fairly aware of that. I'm talking more about how we interact with eachother. I think it is changing for the worse because of social networking. Why is it easier to text or chat with someone online than it is to talk to that person face to face? Why can we say something to someone online that we would never say to them in person? I think a lot of it has to do with the loss of the physical connection. Online, there is no phyiscal connection, even if you know the person and see them everyday. Body language is a key element of human interaction that cannot by mimicked in cyber space. I think excessive amounts of chatting with people online makes us forget how we are supposed to interact with people in real life. I mean in casual relationships it won't matter so much, but I think if we start spilling our guts online to other people and exposing the deep layers of our hearts with the pseudo-anonymity of the internet, we become less capable of doing so one-on-one in person. There are different rules in physical interaction than there are on the internet. This is hard to explain, but a while back I was reading about mediums, not people who talk to the dead, but the ways in which we express our ideas to other people, anyway, I forget what I was reading but the guy was talking about how there are different mediums for different ideas we are trying to express to others, for example you can't smell something through a television (the most basic level). Different levels of human interaction are needed to express different levels of ideas. I think that we are trying to shove interactions between humans that need to take place in person onto the internet.

Example: On the internet I can express an idea but I cannot act the idea out. I can tell a girl that I like her and am interested in her, but this is the only way I can show my interest in her online. While, in the real world I can actually do things with this girl and try to get to know her while keeping the "im interestedness" of it inside, perhaps where it needs to be in order to cultivate a base for the relationship.

This gets even more complicated in social interaction where there is both online interaction and physical interaction. Where do you draw the line. In my opinion I think matters of the heart MUST be confined to physical interaction in order to be regarded as sacred (not in a religious sense but in a sense where we know that it is not something cheap or free.) We talk online to plan for things where we physically interact with eachother, we have to realize that online interaction has limitations and rules just like physical interaction.

Anyway, these are just raw unprocessed thoughts. What do you think? lets have a discussion.