The Touch Of Your Hand

High on the list of the problems we encounter in our modern, high-tech world is the problem of human access — especially to people or things controlling, or adversely affecting our lives. Although the population continues to rise, nevertheless the one resource we seem to be fast running out of is access to other people. Those optimistic predictions that technological advances would produce more leisure time in which there would be greater opportunity for closer and richer personal contacts are not coming true. Instead, there is a growing feeling that “somewhere out there” a huge machinery is blocking our passage not only toward those who exercise authority over us but also toward those who are responsible for providing us with goods and services.

Undeniably, one-on-one contact is getting more difficult to achieve: patients attempting to reach their doctors, students their teachers, consumers their vendors, tenants their landlords, citizens their representatives, children their parents. And the intimacy of our zoom-camera TV world quickly dissolves with…