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CGF, '95: People are interacting not only more efficiently, but at an ethereal level, where to age-old prejudices connected to appearance are removed. In this way, communication is held between two "essences", without bodies to hinder them, and the strength of the mind is left to cope by itself.
 

L: I suspect the ethereal level isn't new, and is often undercut by the new efficiency. I read a piece last year that explored the miscommunicative nature of e-mail, and I've had several go-rounds myself to establish the tone of a given message. We use : ) , >: o , etc to nuance e-mail, whereas smiley faces in written correspondence were generally only used by giggly teenagers. Because, I think, written correspondence, and even typed or word-processed correspondence, is more deliberate, more carefully and expressively worded, simply because it takes longer. So people were more likely to express some part of their essence in their words, and there are on record amazing relationships between correspondents, many of whom never met in person. I've always been a letter-writer, and I initially assumed that e-mail would be better in almost every way--'almost' because a tactile letter that someone else has written and folded is still very special. What I found, though, was that my annoyance at people who didn't write back grew, greatly, when all they had to do was type out a message and hit 'send,' dammit, and also that composing e-mail often felt, and still sometimes feels, like sending a box that is smaller than its contents. Maybe that tactile letter was more special than we realized, maybe there's more significance than we knew in the act of sitting down to write or type a letter, beginning with 'Dear' and the date, and ending with finding a stamp and envelope and remembering to catch the mailman next day. We often can't just type a message and hit 'send' because expressing ourselves isn't that simple. Techno-mediated communication is wonderful for keeping in touch and bouncing ideas with people one already knows, but it seems very difficult to get to know someone or to extend a relationship through e-mail.
 

CGF, '95: We are no longer contained by the boundaries of reality, but instead we are ruled by the limits of our own imaginations, making the fantastic possible. Science fiction, movie special effects, computer animation, all of this is attractive to us because we see it as possible.
 

L: I wonder if making the fantastic possible hasn't limited our imaginations; if almost anything is possible, will we even explore the minority that isn't? Will trying to make things possible restrict our imaginings of them? Maybe not. I do think that there's more imaginative excitement in suggestion than in special effects, though--I like bare-bones theater that nonetheless puts me solidly in Illyria, I like that Edward Gorey never tells us exactly what the Curious Sofa does because he knows readers' imaginations are dirtier than anything he could get printed. Even before I begin imagining what the sofa might do, I'm titillated that a suggestion has been made. I think sublety is ultimately more powerful than Star Wars.
 

And yet, as soon as we imagine something wonderful we want to communicate it. Everyone on skein writes, and has written creatively in the past even if he or she doesn't now. We also draw and photograph and perform--look what I saw, or think, or imagined. And technology gives us the tools. Are special effects art? One of Chip Kidd's characters points to photography, realistic facsimile, as the culprit for pretentious and masturbatory art, because art lost its purpose of recording when you could "take" a picture. (Does any other representative form "take" its subject?) Where's the line between recording and interpreting?
 

CGF, '95: These kinds of images feed our imaginations, giving us ideas and fueling our creative abilities to produce a society that is equally without bounds.
 

L: Technology does not seem to bring us together as a society--the bigger it is the more easily we can avoid one another--but I think it does make us more aware and more tolerant. There are obviously lots of fundamentalist websites, but there's also more evidence than there used to be of different ways of existing that just might be valid, too.