Sure they're filled with desire and anticipation, yes they are alone and separate. You are where your body is and the bodies of these folks are not together. And once they're together in the flesh, the encounter is of the senses--touch, smell, sight, taste, hearing. The sensory experience of things absent is contracted, diminished... This is the loss felt when one is wired in cyberspace instead of embedded in world. If you live in the imaginary you don't miss this direct encounter much, perhaps. But in a context where you've had personal eye to eye contact, the machines create distance and coldness--read MASCULINITY. Merleau-Ponty said that the child had to be "defended against the adult and against Piaget" in The Phenomenology of Perception. He meant that we had to remember the child's sophistication, not the child's naivete. The child knows something we have forgotten in academia! We live our daily lives, not desire/plan them. Merleau-Ponty saw that the child's world was animated not because it projected intentionality on things as Piaget thought and as a paradigm based in means/end subordination, causality, and desire does, but because life was not yet ruled by ego! Bill responds