Surely you're joking, Mr. Epstein

The web and email bring geographically diverse communities together. Some of my best friends are people I've never met. Some of the people I've known online (including my boss) have died without us ever meeting face to face.



But the technology that has brought some people together has also isolated us tremendously. Last night my new neighbor knocked on my door. Noticing the boxes in my house, he said, "I'm moving in, too." Fact is, I'm moving out after living here five years and having hardly met most of my neighbors. I've shared an office building for 2.5 years with people down the hall. We've hardly spoken, except when I go to retrieve a Fed Ex that they've signed for.



Once, I encountered a middle Eastern gentlemen in the building after hours. It turns out that he was renting the office next to mine, but I had never met him. He said he was in the textile import business, which sounded kind of odd to me. He disappeared for many weeks shortly after the Sept. 11th attacks. Many of the terrorists lived in NJ and anthrax was detected in several local post offices. (I live in Franklin Park, which was the return address for the letter to Tom Daschle). Was he part of the conspiracy? Was he simply on a business trip or stuck outside the country? I briefly considered phoning the local authorities, but he returned last week.



The sad fact is, I can write whatever I want in this space and my neighbors will never know about it because they aren't computer geeks. So while the web has brought us closer to people we would never otherwise meet, it has isolated us from our geographic neighbors.



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Are you best friends online, in your neighborhood, or both?