I'd like to begin by offering my sincere condolences to anyone who paid money to sit through the latest Bruce Willis 'action' film Surrogates.

With a misguided design aesthetic that thinks big steel clanking doors means 'near future', every word far too desperate to be all zeitgeisty and subtextual and a curious absence of any action or thrills, Surrogates is one of the worst films so far this year.

But what makes Surrogates interesting is what it's telling us about ourselves. The film is set in the future where people sit in special chairs in their houses, never venturing outside. They're plugged into the real world through the use of robots (Surrogates) that go about their business in the world, working and playing at the operator's direction from the safety of the spare room and needing only the occasional recharge.

Apart from showing us how ridiculous Bruce Willis would look with hair, the movie taps into a strong social conscience issue. We're spending too much time on computers and the Internet, it says, and this is the inevitable result – sitting in dark rooms alone, thinking we're connected to the world around us just because computers give us ever-more accurate depictions of it.

It tells us we're scared of social media. How? Hollywood doesn't get many things right (subtlety, originality, the entire career of Stephen Sommers), but one thing it never misses is tapping into the western world's (read: US) mood about an issue. Every time there's an issue capturing the public debate, there's a 'that (insert issue here) movie'

We had it with the onset of AIDS (And the Band Played On, The Internet (The Net and Microsoft (Antitrust and now Surrogates wants to be 'that unplugging movie'.

Hollywood does this because the more a movie costs, the wider they have to pitch it to recoup costs. So we can be reasonably sure most people don't really trust the rise of the machines and technology across industrial and consumer sectors, despite economic gloom.

Focus group the average guy in the street and he'll probably say 'yeah, of course we spend too much time on computers'. When it comes to social media, much smarter people than me have occasionally found it kind of silly that the easiest way to connect with people who are supposed to be your friends is by doing it on a website so you don't have to actually meet or talk to them.

Those of us in technology either as pros or enthusiasts might scoff at such Ludditism. We can see the obvious benefits not just of technology in general but social media in particular. What's easier, emailing a thousand people that the weather's finally getting warmer in your town or you just bought a cool CD or just tweeting it or updating your Facebook status?

But who among us hasn't occasionally felt regret at it being such a beautiful day outside while we're stuck inside on a PC 'connecting'. There's a reason movies about computers are so hard to make exciting. We're entirely closed inside our own mind while we operate one, disconnected from the immediate environment by definition. So there's nothing more boring than watching someone work on a computer if you don't know what they're doing.

Maybe we're secretly just as scared at the rate of change as anyone, but we know computers as so inextricably entrenched in society there's no backing out, that if we even try we'll be left behind in the world?

So with the advent of such mass uncoupling from the people, weather, streets, cities and nature around us, might social media simply be the rise of a digital facsimile of what we hold so dear about living in the world – using our tactile senses to connect with it?

Social media technologies are an attempt to connect in a way the Internet 1.0 wasn't. Web pages are just digital book pages (more or less). Email is sending a view off in someone's direction that may or may not be responded to or shared. Even if it is, it won't be any time soon like in a normal conversation.

Might we recognise social media as more in line with our instinctively social ways? Is Facebook the backyard barbecue and Twitter the wayward, half-drunken declarations of opinions at the pub of the 21st century?

Is it possible we could end up so cut off from the rest of the world but thinking we're 'connected' just because we can read a lot of text or hear a lot of voices other people create?

And if so, will we all have hair as bad as a robotic Bruce Willis?