![]() As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. ![]() We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. ![]() ![]() We are offered robots and a whole world of machine-mediated relationships on networked devices. “.we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. ![]()
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