The full spectrum of social and psychological consequences that accompanied the advent of the internet is too profound to explain or understand (then, now, or ever). It exponentially expanded the parameters of external existence while decreasing the material size of interior existence. It allowed any person to simultaneously possess two competing identities—one actual and one virtual. It altered the value of concepts whose value had once been stable and self-evident (solitude, distance, memory, knowledge). Most critically, it recontextualized every fragment of data that moved through its
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