How More Connected Becomes More Isolated

There is something happening in the emerging digital age that is
profoundly affecting the way in which we socialize and communicate. It
would be superfluous however to put any moral or value judgments on
it, because short of the Armageddon it looks like that not only are
these changes here to stay, they will become more and more entrenched
in the future. The Web has forever changed the way in which we
interact with each other, how we feel about ourselves, and not just
affects our self-image but has given us an unprecedented tool to
recreate ourselves.At this point the amount of 'remote interaction' we
engage in depends a lot on the proclivities of the individual. By
remote interaction, I mean the use of a device between you and another
individual to communicate. Perhaps the most ancient form of this is
the letter, while the most common toddy is the telephone (or is it
email?).But new, remoter ways of social interaction are emerging, and
they all point in their own crude and primitive way the ways in which
we will be reinventing who we are in the future. One of the most
popular is Facebook (or should I call it Farcebook or Ghostbook?).
Some of my friends (who I feel I no longer really know) seem to haunt
the place day and night, sending out quips about what they are eating
for dinner and only posting their most flattering pictures, or mostly
those from when they were young. Remoter still and the ultimate
replacement for the silly Facebook will be virtual worlds, brilliant
extensions of what we are now seeing in programs like Second Life and
in dozens of online games.Despite my implicit criticism, I'm not
really judging. All I'm saying is that in a future where you are
constantly striving to create ideal or fantasy versions of you, you
may very well become extremely confused about who you really are.