I keep having conversations verging on moral panics that social networking, web2.0, mobile phones etc etc are eroding our ability to converse and build relationships. I keep saying that in all probability they are merely reconfiguring how we use our communicative bandwidth. Of course, the main caveat in that is that technologies always have effects on our sensorium and so our thinking (cf McLuhan, Understanding Media). So this article, How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle: helps us to note that indicators of face-to-face time and work are not falling off, if anything they are rising in usage. What's going on? "Technology makes it more fun and more profitable to live and work close to the people who matter most to your life and work. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, an expert on city economies, argues that communications technology and face-to-face interactions are complements like salt and pepper, rather than substitutes like butter and margarine. Paradoxically, your cell phone, email, and Facebook networks are making it more attractive to meet people in the flesh."
Quite so. There's more to being embodied, clearly, than the neo-gnostic ideas of many pundits.
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