The most romantic thing I’ve ever seen – and it happened on Facebook

The most cheesily romantic thing I’ve ever seen happened on my bus on Monday morning. And also on Facebook.

Two teenagers, not a couple (yet), but obviously good friends, sat on the seat in front of me. He pulled out a touchscreen phone, and for a few stops they swapped YouTube funnies, and music videos, leaning in together over the tiny screen with one earphone each, taking turns to bring up new videos.

Then she started showing him photos from a party they had both attended at the weekend. He threatened to put them on Facebook, she tried to stop him – fingertips brushed together across a glowing touchscreen.

He went through with his threat, and she jokingly cuffed him across the back of his head, pretending to be annoyed, butvisibly pleased that all the people in their networks would see her photo in his feed, a contemporary version of the polaroid tucked into the school locker, their names linked in an update, both highlighted together in Facebook blue.

It was a perfect picture of how social networking and the mobile internet has changed every human interaction for that generation – and of how in some ways every human reaction has remained exactly the same.

When the Pope warns us of alienation , or when slightly better informed commentators like  Douglas Rushkoff complain that ” It’s as if the relentless demand of networks for me to be everywhere, all the time, were denying me access to the moment in which I am really living,”  they are picking on side issues.

For the generation who have grown up immersed in social networks, there is no distinction to be drawn between the physical world and the digital – both are inextricably linked, in every moment.