The Sandy Hook massacre should "force us to confront yet again the ways in which ever more of our lives are lived on a screen, in the cloud, via our computers and phones and tablets...."

Says Michael S. Rosenwald, noting that:

Except for using the bathroom and eating his meals, getting a haircut was just about the only thing Lanza couldn’t do online.

Adam Lanza got haircuts, went to the bathroom, and ate food. Are we not forced to confront yet again our eating of food, getting of haircuts, and going to the bathroom?

[Lanza] seems to have found “an illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship”.... Lanza didn’t need to trek out into his town....

Shop owners in tightknit Newtown didn’t know him, I think, because he had no reason to know them. Amazon could deliver anything he wanted to his door by the next day.

The time we spend shopping is in decline.... The local stores we once loved visiting have been replaced by UPS drivers we rarely see....

Now, it's a problem that we don't spend enough time schlepping around at the mall? The cashiers at The Gap and Banana Republic were supposedly keeping us minimally socialized? Or is it that "tightknit Newtown" had shop owners who reinforced the social structure of the picture-book town — kinda like Mr. Gower, the drugstore man, in "It's a Wonderful Life"...

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