"I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou."
--Martin Buber



To become, we must have another, or many others. Once we become, we must respond to others. What intrigues me about this statement is how it relates to what you're doing right now--entrenching in the internet. It fascinates me the degree to which some junkies (and I admit that I am one) feel more of a 'you' in the essentially one-sided internet than they do in reality. Many people (in this case, I am not a member) feel more comfortable with their machine and its mediation of interaction than they do with fleshly interaction. There is a sense of community and communication on the net (though I despise the term 'global village') but really, there is no interaction at all. Even in chat rooms, you have no guarantee that you are interacting with someone. I know many programmers who could create engines capable of responding to certain input with responses that would realistically emulate another person. What guarantee is there that that person in the Czech Republic is real? Yet, we seem to find the idea of digital interaction less painful and more comfortable than the real thing. Why is this?

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