why I'm uncomfortable with IM and "status updates"

Our society is pretty much insane, and I think one of many reasons is that our reality is manufactured and fake and emotionally unsustainable.  On the surface, it is an incredible boon that we can stay in touch with each other over great distances, but even the expression "in touch" is a metaphor whose sense is at this point stretched to the snapping point: sometimes I think that the telephone—not even cell phones, just the 19th-century invention itself—must cause terrible confusion at a deep unconscious level of our animal brains, the idea that we are talking to someone who is not even here...*

Cell phones take it to another level: now we expect to be able to "reach" everyone without delay.  We demand to hear the voices of our friends and relatives, no matter where in the world they are.  I don't mean to say I'd prefer it if I couldn't, but when reading a book like Against the Day or The Adventures of Augie March I'm struck—just short of floored, I might even say—by the idea that people could go years and years with no word at all from their family, not because they'd had a falling out, but simply because they were in different places.  And I don't mean just not communicating: I mean no idea at all, no way of knowing even if they were alive.  Does that sound good to me?  Well, no.  But it seems realer, somehow...or I suppose what I mean to say is truer to our pyschological reality, or more compatible with our mental faculties, our ability to relate to the universe...?  To put it simply, I wonder whether being "in touch" with people who are not there might make us less in touch with reality, whether all this "contact" might be a kind of unhealthy overstimulation and might actually make us much more isolated and alone...**

* A letter is an essentially different proposition, not relying upon the illusion of closeness: we are, after all, able to read the words of Chaucer without believing that we are "in touch" with him.^a  (E-mail, by contrast, with its immediate transmission, introduces the illusion of immediacy.)

** An obvious example: believing we're "in touch" when in fact we're sitting alone in a room with a computer and staring at a video screen, or crushing a little radio transmitter up to the side of our faces and talking into a microphone.  But that's not really my point: I'm talking more about our sense of ourselves in relation to our own lives—I want to say our place in our own pantheons, but that doesn't actually make sense.  (Not that it matters...who reads footnotes?)

^aAlthough of course McLuhan felt (if I understood him right) that written language itself was the real fall from grace: "Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror..."  Sounds GREAT!