Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

More and more in the last forty years, we have chosen to experience reality as relaxed and passive consumers, in a condition closely related to sleep, gazing from the depths of our recliners toward a dance of electron beams upon a fluorescent screen.

Value of Physical Proximity

Technology is not itself to blame for the alienation and aloneness that characterize contemporary life in affluent modernity. Multi-directional devices such as telephones, electronic mail, and the Internet provide obvious opportunities for individual give-and-take and, with the opportunity for multiple simultaneous or serial connections, for new forms of community-building. But these media are inevitably limited in their ability to foster human connectedness by the fact of physical absence. I am not my true self in an Internet chat room, even when I try to be. I am unavoidably mediated through a screen-self and my co-chatters are equally shaped and reshaped by the same phenomenon.

When I am in actual physical proximity with my conversation partner, I may, of course, try on various selves. But the fact of our physical closeness provides a constant check on this behavior. I am aware that I am constantly observed and multiply sensed. My conversation partner and I experience one another within the complexity of signs, the reciprocal and multivalent flow of data that has characterized human contact for millennia. There is, for example, the smell of body, breath, clothing, scent, hair; rate and quality of breathing; subtlety of facial expression; the elaborate and flexible language of physical posture and movement; quality of touching or gestures which move toward touching; eye contact and the search for meaning in the eyes; the sensing of sexual arousal in oneself or in the partner; and quite possibly other as yet unproven exchanges of energy between bodies.