Substituting for face-to-face communication
A status update is not directive. It is merely a thought, a jotted down tidbit of someone's day, cast off onto the Internet without direction or intent. And any responses to it are, well... just that. A meaningless comment on a meaningless piece of minutiae. In perhaps the most absurd possible example of this, my neighbor once complained of never being able to talk to me anymore by posting on a status. My neighbor... who could walk to my front door and talk to me in person anytime in less than thirty seconds. People simply don't make as much of an effort to maintain friendships when they can read about people's lives online.
But if you happen to read a status about an event going on in someone's life, does that make you informed on how his or her life has been progressing since you last talked? The overwhelmingly common mindset seems to suggest that it does. People take tweets, status updates, and blog posts as a satisfactory substitute for phone calls, personal letters, emails, and (heaven forbid) actual face-to-face communication because this phenomenon has so insidiously saturated our everyday lives. Perhaps it is the same concept as considering artificial sweeteners the same thing as cane sugar. My mother often tells me how different soda tastes now than it did when she was growing up in the 60's. Will we soon be watching the widening, disbelieving eyes of the next generation when we tell them about calling each other on the phone?