Dangers linked to an increasingly online world

Jim Geraghty of National Review Online shares his concerns about our forced move toward online-only interaction. We shifted from in-person schooling to online schooling. We shifted from restaurant meals to take-out. We shifted from movie theaters to streaming services. We shifted from in-person visits with our doctors to telemedicine. Not every aspect of all of these changes is bad! But 2021 needs to be a year of resocialization — not in the sense of reengineering or resetting people's social values, beliefs, and norms, but in the sense of getting people used to interacting with each other in person again. We've lost a year's worth of reading people's faces — because they were often covered by masks — and all of the nonverbal cues of body language. …