less or more troubling

First, I just picked up my mail and Baylor's Center for Christian Ethics' Christian Reflection journal was there--topic for this issue--Virtual Lives. I haven't read it yet, but will bring it to pass around next week, it's not online (I checked).

Second: what do you think of this quote that I read today? "The distance to my fellow man is [for me] a very long one." Besides the ache in my heart when I read it, I wonder if it might be true for most/all/some of us. Speculation and I think some research supports the idea that our socially-networked, frenetic society might be compensating for our difficulty "meeting" each other face-to-face, while making it harder to (learn to) do so. Then in class, Jonathan mentioned the loss of the community and how the internet could be seen (in his example, in China) as  morally disruptive to community and development of human feelings/intellect--and the question of what and where should/shouldn't be part available as Sha wrote about cybersecurity today. Whether we are talking about the connections of knowledge or the aggregation of it, is seems that we must always return to the question of human relationships. What Kafka wrote in his fourth Octavo notebook at the beginning of the 20th Century (my quote above, of course) is estrangement, plain and simple, estrangement even from his fellow sufferers.  Will that be less or more pronounced in our age and the next?