These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time.

we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things.

Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

Technology doesn't just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.

Technology proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.

I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows.

There's a lot of research that indicates the brain rewards us for multi-tasking by giving us a shot of neurochemicals whenever we start a new task. Our brain rewards us even as our performance in every task degrades. We don't even notice that our performance is bad. We don't care. We feel like masters of the universe because our brain is chemically rewarding us for multi-tasking.