Surrogate Intercorporeality: Urbanization and the growth of the ?world-wide inter-web, as you call it?

It seems like the curmudgeony insistence on the alienating effects of the internet must be both right and wrong. In Dreyfus? ?On the Internet?, this notion seems to emerge out of a certain reading of Merleau Ponty, in which ?intercorporeality? is a taken as a concept of limits. We need our bodies to interact with the people we interact with. The limits implied by the emphasis on this type of intercorporeality signify that bodily interaction is not possible over the internet. And yet, if studies have found that internet usage decreases connectivity in families and communities, if people seem to be bodily compelled to hang out online day and night instead of using their bodies to communicate with their ?actual? location, then we must pose two skeptical marxist questions:

1) Can we be so certain about the non-intercorporeality of internet users with each other?
2) And may not the information-seeking public be actively deploying a tough therapy for a previously existing alienation?

The very concepts of surrogacy and the urban suggest that we need not touch, see or even hear each other in order to participate fully in intercorporeality. Surrogacy means that we can act as each other: my bodies can be you across space, and be for you. The urban means a closeness beyond the epistemic positing of presence: we live close together, in an infinity suggested only by the perceptual experience of finite multiplicity. The play of metaphore involved in surrogacy dominates experience, for even direct investigation is given over to the gestures of all our others. Taken together with the fact that even the particularity of our egos is still a we composed of all names, faces and unknown bodies, and it becomes clear that even cats have internet, and that it has probably been theorized since at least 6,000 BCE.
And the second question tomorrow...