Facebook, letters, and connecting

My five-year-old daughter (the especially expressive one in the middle w/ hair in her face)goes through my card/stationery drawer almost daily, hunting for envelopes and /or cards to give to her friends at school. I've been fighting a losing battle to keep her from using up all her cards before Valentine's Day. Why does she feel the need to give her friends pictures and notes when she sees them so frequently? For that matter, why do people text, e-mail, facebook, and connect in such a rabid fashion these days, seemingly most often with the people w/ whom they actually have more face-to-face contact?
We can't seem to get enough of each other, always trying to be closer and fretting that others are communicating more, and more effectively, and we're getting left out. I think we're all determined to remedy that old literary struggle of never being truly understood--today.
I'm a part of this craziness w/ frequent facebook postings. I've always loved writing, sending, and receiving letters, but have never been much for the phone and went through just a short-lived phase where I sent a lot of e-mail. Perhaps facebook will soon be replaced by another phenomenon and I'll probably follow the bandwagon, anxious to be heard, though those tangible, far less emphemeral pieces of paper my daughter and I stuff in envelopes never completely go out of style; embodying so poignantly the whole idea--connection that lingers even when the connector is out of sight.