Thought of the Day 12.18.09

There’s something about being physically in the presence of another person which is fundamentally different from any other sort of interaction. Now in the old days, you basically had two options: meeting in person or writing letters. And even though writing letters is better than no communication at all, no one ever made the mistake of thinking that correspondence and being physically together were the same thing.

Nowadays, however, we have all sorts of gradations on the spectrum between those two extremes, from telephones to email to videoconferencing to texting. But all these technologies suffer from the same basic defect. Unlike what Ma Bell used to say, you simply can’t “reach out and touch someone” over a land line.

Why is this a problem? Because the existence of technology that facilitates the illusion of proximity has caused many people to lose actual proximity. As with so many other things, bad forgeries aren’t the real danger. It’s the well-crafted impostor which makes you forget the importance of having the real thing.