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"The connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread. To people who lead a less-than-wired existence, that may seem like a bit of a 'duh,' but I spend so much interacting with people on the Web that I have become a little socially deficient." So says David Carr, writing for the New York Times' Media Decoder blog. In this lovely essay, Carr describes the dinner party we all wish we were invited to—a bunch of tech-savvy, hyper-informed journalists and academics eating and chatting and sharing home-baked bread— at which Carr learned that his friend, the super-smart Clay Shirkey, who studies the Internet's effects on society and relationships, had baked the delicious that was being served with dinner. This led to a conversation about where the recipe came from, and suddenly Carr felt he truly knew his friend for the first time. Which led him to meditate on the importance of "nutritive content" in our friendships. It's all well and good to "like" a friend's post on Facebook, but what ever happened to breaking bread with our friends?

As Carr describes his revelatory dinner party, "No one tweeted, no one texted, everyone talked. I’ve noticed more and more that when I go to gatherings, people are walking around in their own customized world defined by what is on their smartphone, not by who is sitting next to them at dinner. The serendipity of the offline world has been increasingly replaced by the nice, orderly online world where people only follow whom they want to and opt in to conversations that seem interesting."

We're busy, and as adults with spouses, partners, coworkers, and children to deal with, many of us forget to make time for our good, old-fashioned friendships. And yet we've read again and again that maintaining friendships are good for us in numerable ways. They may even help us live longer. Plus, Carr's is one of the most pleasant calls to action I've ever read: we should all remember to make time for our friends. Not FaceTime, but IRL time. Sharing nutrition, and the kind of rambling stories that don't make for good tweets. Breaking bread. Actual, real, delicious, beautiful (and here's a challenge: don't take an Instagram of it) bread.

Read More:
How social media can sustain relationships.
Making time for friends keeps you young.