Virtual Is No Refuge From Reality

The general impoverishment of the public realm has produced for adults an amazing amount of pervasive situational loneliness. Despite the fact that so many Americans own a car there is no place to go, at least no places of casual socializing unrelated to commerce. So the chat rooms and listserves of the Internet are supposed to take the place of actually being somewhere. For children, this trend has been catastrophic because they lack the mobility to use environments designed solely for motoring. This consigns kids either to nebulous low-grade hangouts in the left over scrap places of suburbia or to virtual and heavily commercialized public realms of television and the computer.