I came across the following quote on Facebook earlier today: "Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet."  The quote is attributed to Noah Smith, a professor of finance. What Smith is essentially saying is that we seem to "live" digitally now more than we do the traditional way. It makes perfect sense. If you're like me, you probably communicate more with friends and family via email, text, WhatsApp, or social media than you do in person. You're likely shopping more online than you do at brick-and-mortar stores. And you're probably watching movies more frequently through services like Netflix than at the movie theater. While there's no question the convenience the internet affords us has made our lives easier in myriad ways, it's also made human interaction much more impersonal. If you'd asked me in the 90s whether relatives and friends would someday wish ...

It feels like it was yesterday that chatrooms were all the rage. Everyone and his brother seemed to go into chatrooms on what was then America Online (now AOL), Yahoo!, and other sites. On America Online, for example, you could choose from a wide array of chatrooms catering to everyone from those who were "40 and single" to "movie lovers." People really took it to extremes, though. I remember there being a chatroom called "AOL Prom" where kids actually pretended they were at a prom dancing with each other. No joke! Before dating sites like Match.com became popular, many people took to these chatrooms to find love. I liked going into the city-specific ones, as well as the chatrooms dedicated to sports talk. However, even though a few remain, chatrooms are mostly a thing of the past  (of the late 90s to early 2000s, to be exact). In the world of online chatting, they seem to have been dethroned by social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Though...