“Staying in touch” electronically will never be the same

So these days people, friends, families are scattered all over the damn place, but there’s an idea: “no problem, we stay in touch” electronically and/or by flying all over the damn place.

Zoom, Skype, Facetime, etc.

It’s not the same. There are missing dimensions.

One that modern people hardly ever think of is smell.

The buzz, distraction, detachment, preoccupation of industrial modernity is repressive and anti-somatic enough as to tend to diminish our sense of smell. But if you have a pet or if you pay close attention to the lives of animals you’ll notice how prominent that sense is in their experience of life. The absence of that dimension when we communicate electronically is a bigger deal than we usually recognize.