Torch, Spring/Summer 2011

Spring–Summer 2011 | TORCH 9 W ho has not seen this family at a restaurant: Dad is watching the game on TV, Mom is talking on her cell phone, and the children are absorbed in texting friends or playing handheld video games. This scene is what Professor Kenneth J. Gergen of Swarthmore College calls “absent presence.” In a recent article in The New York Times Magazine , Virginia Heffernan probes the sense of loss our “digital social life” seems to produce. As she notes, the process of turning continuous sound and light waves into discrete points of data requires throwing some of the original information away. She wonders if this vague awareness that something is lost in the