Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes
for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to
face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance.
One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of
interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online
communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication,
which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or
inconvenient. And then texting which facilitated yet faster, and more
mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements
upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if
diminished, substitutes for it. But then a funny thing happened...
-NY Times
