As Craig Easterbrook notes in his essay ``The Heart of a New Machine'', people throughout history have sought companionship. This is difficult to come by, but the computer has now made it easier to plug in, and chat. Unlike other hobbies that involve real humans, and usually have positive social side effects (e.g.: softball), computers are a ``solitary anti-social pursuit ... devoid of demands on the imagination.''[4, p. 139] Craig Brod argues that children are the most suseptible to this new medium:
In general, there is a reduction of external sensory experience. The outside world fades, and the child becomes locked into the machine's world ... develop[ing] an intolerance for human relationships ... they become accustomed to ... a rapid-fire dialog.[4, p. 140]
While the Internet has been able to compress and eliminate time and space, it has also been able to eliminate identity. One of the things that the new digital generation excels at, is pretending to be someone else, or several different people at once.[10, p. 147] Computer scientists can pretend to be starship officers; as seen on the popular television show Ally McBeal, a sixteen year old boy pretended to be a college grad student, while the main character, Ally, pretended to be ten years younger through Internet chat, engaging in sexually explicit conversations.
Strikingly, people seem to get very personal, when they are pretending to be someone else or masking their identity. This, argues Rheingold, is a basic facet of the Internet chat rooms, and life. While people on the Internet would like to believe that it is a utopian society with ``scout's honour'', it happens often enough. When an imposter is discovered, the people associated are shocked and dismayed, they take it as a personal attack on themselves.[10, p. 165]