Electronic touch

Imagine what will happen if we sit in our rooms all our lives and keep in touch with the rest of the world electronically.

Hubert Dreyfus, attends to that imagined world, in the third part of his book On the Internet.

He notes that, in such an imagined world, "our bodies seem irrelevant and our minds seem to be present wherever our interest takes us."

Some have worried that if we stay in our rooms and only relate to the world and other people through the Net, we'll grow isolated and depressed. Some Stanford researchers have lamented that not enough attention is being paid to this problem. (J. Mark, "Portrait of a newer, lonlier crowd is captured in an Internet survey," The New York Times, Feb. 16, 2000)

So, have we gotten to a stage of ubiquity imagined in these surveys? What's wrong with disemobided presence? If there's a problem, how could our understanding evolve into doing business in a better way? Will thinking about these problems help us better focus our energies on a more productive and a better world scaffolding?