Well . . . No. And yes. The issue surfaces regularly in management situations. It sounds like this: "This guy is great with social media, software and applications. He knows how to work online with other people. He understands social networking. But get him or her in front of people and it's a disaster. So I can't promote him. Get him out of the cubicle and he's lost. He doesn't know how to read people."
In what seems to be a rejection of the above, Penelope Trunk makes the point that Gen-Yers are better communicators than the rest of the generations. She supports her idea with research from Stanford writing classes. The research finds that texting and tweeting makes them better communicators. It teaches them rhetorical adaptability, the ability to make adjustments to their "reading" audience. All well and good. And obviously true. I'd have to be brain dead not to realize that Gen-Yers are better at electronic communication and that the near instant feedback teaches them quickly adjust their messages. (Still, recent research suggests a lot of caveats to that conventional conclusion. Gen-Yers just use electronic communication more--they're not necessarily better at it than the other generations.) But Penelope pushes the envelope too far in arguing that they're better at face-to-face communication than their elders. Better? I doubt it. Equal to? On some occasions, perhaps. But probably poorer than the generations that didn't start out with social media.
For example, a very important issue that both Penelope and the research on writing skills omit is the high impact of the nonverbal. The research is about written rhetoric, not about oral rhetoric. In distinct contrast, research on oral communication indicates that more than 90% of face-to-face communication is nonverbal. That includes the impact of context, verbal tone, posture, gesture and eye contact. And it's all those nonverbal messages that take a lot of time to learn. You can text from now to doomsday and you won't learn, for example, what silence in a given conversation means. I've watched people lose their jobs as a result of the simple failure to understand silence in a given context. And when you ask, you're asking for trouble, unless you know how to ask in a way that doesn't evoke defensiveness. And to be blunt, it's hard enough to learn what the real questions are in your thirties and forties, much less in your twenties. It's even more difficult ...
No one has ever accused me of being a Luddite. I think texting and tweeting have their uses. And I've learned that if I want to contact someone, texting is often the fastest. So I do it. Gen-Yers do more of it than the other generations. Keep it up! But don't get fooled. On its own, it's horribly inadquate. If you want to succeed in today's world, you're going to need world-class expertise in a new rhetorical technology: SMART TALK. Effective talk that's face-to-face and can manage both the verbal AND the nonverbal. The demands of new contexts put people in situations they wouldn't have dreamed of just 15 years ago. As a result, I spend days and weeks teaching Gen-Yers, Gen-Xers and even Boomers how to manage face-to-face in today's complex, complicated and volatile world.
Does social media make you anti-social? NOPE. It's just plainly inadequate for the demands of the 21st century.