86. {{U}}Contemporary technological reporting is full of notions of electronic communities in which people interact across regions or entire continents.{{/U}} Could such "virtual communities" eventually replace geographically localized social relations? There are reasons to suspect that, as the foundation for a democratic society, virtual communities will remain seriously deficient.
87. {{U}}For example, electronic communication filters out and alters much of the subtlety, warmth, contextuality, and so on that seem important to fully human, morally engaged interaction.{{/U}} That is one reason many Japanese and European executives persist in considering face-to-face encounter essential to their business dealings and why many engineers, too, prefer face-to-face encounter and find it essential to their creativity.
88. {{U}}Even hypothetical new media (e. g. advanced "virtual realities"), conveying a dimensionally richer sensory display are unlikely to prove fully satisfactory, substitutes for face-to-face interaction.{{/U}} Electronic media decompose holistic experience into analytically distinct sensory dimensions and then transmit the latter. At the receiving end, people can resynthesize the resulting parts into a coherent experience, but the new whole is invariably different and, in some fundamental sense, less than the original.
Second, there is evidence that screen-based technologies (such as TV and computer monitors) are prone to induce democratically unpromising psychopathologies, ranging from escapism to passivity, obsession, confusing watching with doing, withdrawal from other forms of social engagement, or distancing from moral consequences.
Third, a strength--but also a drawback--to a virtual community is that any member can exit instantly. Indeed, an entire virtual community can decline or perish in the wink of an eye.
89. {{U}}To the extent that membership in virtual communities proves less stable than that obtaining in other forms of democratic community, or that social relations prove less thick (i. e. less embedded in a context filled with shared meaning and history), there could be adverse consequences for individual psychological and moral development.{{/U}}
90. {{U}}no matter with whom we communicate or how far our imaginations fly, our bodies--and hence many material interdependencies with other people--always remain locally situated.{{/U}} Thus it seems morally hazardous to commune with far-flung tele-mates, if that means growing indifferent to physical neighbors. It is not encouraging to observe just such indifference in California's Silicon Valley, one of the world's most "highly wired" regions.