You don’t lose reality by communicating at a distance. You don’t become a “virtual” person. I wrote about this a year ago, but the silliness hasn’t abated, so I want to make the point again.

An online gathering of people can appropriately be called a “virtual” gathering. They aren’t really coming together; they get the effect of it through technology. The people participating, though, remain real. You’d think that after over a century of telephones, everyone would grasp that people can be real without being in the same room.
(more…)