Have you ever felt a real, honest human connection using only digital media to experience that human connection?  Yes, of course, you say?  You have allowed your mind to leap across the discreet abyss to find an analog meaning at the end of a digital circuit?

What are "real" connections in our digital world?  We share stories, ideas, feelings, and even emotions through an electronic medium that has become so real, so inseparable from our lives, so intertwined,  that we have a hard time making a distinction between real and representational.

We have always, in some abstract way, attempted to understand distance between us.  It has vexed us throughout history.  The digital domain, traveling near the speed of light, has created even more questions than it has answered aside from maybe offering a solution to  the problem if immediacy. In Poetry, Language, and Thought, Martin Heidegger created a scenario where we were unsure of what long distance actually did to us:

Man puts the longest
distances between him
in the shortest time.
He puts the greatest
distances behind
himself and thus puts
everything before
himself at the shortest
range.  Yet the frantic
abolition of all
distances brings no
nearness; for nearness
does not consist in
shortness of distance.
What is least remote
from us in point of
distance, by virtue of
its picture on film or its
sound on the radio,
can remain far from us.
What is incalculably
far from us in point of
distance can be near
to us.  Short distance is
not in itself nearness.
Nor is great distance
remoteness.

What can be seen when we look at digital representations of real things?  We soon realize that the image they offer to immediate sensible intuition, quickly falls away.

[image created by me.  a fictional book cover.  for non-fictional reasons.]