What sex was for the Puritans, technology has become for us. We’ve focussed our collective anxiety on digital excess, and reconnecting with the “real” world around us represents one effort to control it. | And yet the “real” world, like the “real” America, is an insidious idea. It suggests that the selves we are online aren’t authentic, and that the relationships that we forge in digital spaces aren’t meaningful. […] Is it any less real when we fall in love and break up over Gchat than when we get fired over e-mail and then find a new job on LinkedIn? –Casey N. Cep, The New Yorker.