[MaybiusStrip]

I found this article angsty, obnoxious and full of belabored, melodramatic prose, just like the rest of Foer's writing.

The instinct not to interfere in complete stranger's emotional turmoil -- especially when she is a 15 year old girl and you are a man in his 30s -- has little to do with technology. There are other ways to distract oneself in uncomfortable situations.

I also can't relate to his "diminished subsitute" hypothesis. When I look at my text/call/email/skype logs I'm hard pressed to find any instances where I used a "diminished" medium -- sending a text when I should have called, calling when I should have visited, etc... Some people may do that, but that's not a symptom of technology, that's just a way of being rude that technology has enabled.

That's really the crux of the problem with modern communication technology. It gives people more outlets to be impolite by using it an innapropriate times or innapropriately. But in many ways, it allows us to connect and stay in touch with people that were never possible before.