What Is Social Media Replacing?

I just finished an interview with a local publication for an article on social media where the interviewer asked an interesting question that went something like this:

Over the last few years, and into the next few years, what do you feel that social media is replacing?

Hmmm…that’s very interesting. What it it replacing? Well, the easy answer is to say that it’s replacing time spent in the “real world”, according to some studies on the subject, but I think that the real answer, at least to me, is that it’s replacing “ignorance”. Now, I don’t mean ignorance in the sense of “being ignorant”, to which other malicious words are usually tied. I simply mean ignorance in the sense of a “lack of knowledge, education, or awareness” about a particular thing.

Social media replaces ignorance about customer sentiments.
Social media replaces ignorance about world events.
Social media replaces ignorance about local issues.

You get the point… Sure, I believe that things like telephone time, as in, the nightly chat between classmates after school has now, in some small part has been replaced by Facebook, and perhaps LinkedIn may substitute for a cold call now and then. But at the end of the day, social media is playing an important roll in filling a void.

What do you think?