My colleague Deborah sat down in my office after a blog-heavy morning and said, “You know, this whole social networking thing, doesn’t this seem a lot like the old days when we got together on friends’ front porches in the summer evenings to chat, drink a little beer, talk politics, clear our heads a bit after the day?”

Of course the days she was reminiscing about were college days and maybe our heads weren’t so clear, but you have the picture. I remember those nights well: the screen porch, the conversations, the smoke drifting upward, the hard edges of political and social give-and-take somewhat blunted in the warm South Carolina night air.

That was time well spent, but time we no longer have, nor the front porch to gather on. People are more isolated now and more apt to hunker down in the evenings after work. Maybe the new “social” space online appeals because we are tired of hunkering in front of the TV…maybe the books from a new crop of writers are less than enthralling…maybe our peers still have conversation worth picking up on.

Where IS our front porch these days? As Deborah says, “We never play outside anymore!” Aren’t we really looking for a sense of neighborhood, connections that allow us to hear something amusing, say something important, feel less isolated?

Maybe we need to connect, more than ever before. There’s the computer sitting over there (still warm from our last session on E-bay) but didn’t we hear lately about something called Second Life? Didn’t we read an interesting blog over a co-worker’s shoulder at work today…what was that URL? And there were some neat photos in Flickr, librarian trading cards. Who thought that up?

The fact is, people all around us are connecting in so many new ways. Mostly younger people, at least for now. The USA Today survey that told us that college students would rather give up beer than Facebook gave us the news: These kids are not out on the porch, and they are not in the public library…not even in the college library. They are chatting it up, making friends, and passing information around online.

Of course, they could be online in the public library. The public library as front porch for the community…something to think about.