Have we lost our minds, or did that happen several years ago? Nearly a year and a half left before the national nightmare is over — or until it yields to another. It may be my imagination, but there is an eerie correspondence between the last 7 years or so and the rise of the very medium that each of is using right now. Are we so distracted by the promise of instant virtual contact with an invisible community that we have stopped paying attention to what’s really going on around us? Plato warned of too heavy a reliance on the technology of the written word; am I a crank to suggest that we have stopped acting in the real world because we have been tamed by the virtual world of IM, blogs, and pirated downloads?
