wise words

This is Feingold writing in the Voice yesterday:

The Internet and its attendant activities—e-mailing, Googling, Twittering, social networking, chatting, IM-ing, downloading-on-demand—have changed and are changing every aspect of human relations. Our civilization has become "virtual." The majority of our one-on-one contacts are now computerized, carried on in the absence of each other's bodies, faces, and often even voices. The theater—a place of three-dimensional solidity that, by its transience, links us to the spirit's invisible world—has to be both more than virtual and less. It has to build, each night, a context in which an audience wants to live for a time, and it has to fit that context into some larger sense of aliveness that all the virtual contacts and all the downloadable data on the Web can somehow never supply. Its immediacy, its defiant reality, the ultimate invisibility that makes it mysterious—taken together, they make the reason we do it, the reason we remember those who did it well, the reason we so look forward to those who will come to amaze us next, by the way they give meaning to the vanishing moment.

Michael Feingold, VV, 5/20/09

Really struck a chord with me.