Sand in the desert of internet

There is this one nice young lady in a group I've recently hung around. She just disappeared for awhile. Since there was some messy problem with the group, we just wondered about her and noone really took notice about her disappearance. I think people all just assumed that she was too busy with real life or she just took a rest from the net or she was just tired of the whole mess. It just turned out that she was in a very bad accident and has just been sent out of ICU for some days. It's good knowing that she's getting better and better but the incident also makes me re-think about this idea which has been on my mind for a very long time...

My family move twice since I was born. The last time when we moved from the old house to this one we are living now, the old house was also cleared out for a new project on the land. We had no telephone at that time and I don't think that my old friends knew my old address even many of them came to visit me once in a while. I always thought that moving is one of the reasons people lost the contact with old acquaintance.

But from the first day of internet hanging around, I have other visions. For example, like that lady, we (the group) just know her screenname, her email address which is actually not the official one, we were not that much close to know more about her (like all other internet relationship). (We should take care of our real information for our own sake, rite?) But, we were somehow just a group of people from all over the world which makes internet and screennames the best mean of communication. So... if anything happens to any of our internet friends, how can we get to know? So... does internet (or other modern communication means from IM to cell phone), which first seems somehow bring people closer to others soul from around the world, actually make people more solitary? Does it make us more isolated from society?


Is it...?