To tell the laity of our love

Thanks to everyone that has been commenting!  All of your great points are really, REALLY helping me to formulate a solid idea of what I want to write about.  Something I'd like to address more comprehensively is Donne's stanza that says, 


"Dull sublunary lovers' love  
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove                                     
    The thing which elemented it."

My original thought was that our relationships are "sublunary" like this now, because thanks to social media, absence has been all but eliminated.  But now I realize that that was so, so wrong.  Because absence has been removed from the equation (cell phones, email, skype, etc.) and because social networking has taken off so significantly, none (okay, few) of our relationships are "elemented" by physical closeness anymore.  This study that I referred to in my last post says that people have smaller social circles than they have in the past.  Is this because they have such strong and meaningful relationships that they don't need as many people in their personal networks?  Relationships that are based upon physical proximity and convenience aren't really necessary anymore.  

I've found several other studies that say people are able to form better relationships online because of the sense of anonymity.  They can create their own identity.  Ideally, they'll just be truer to what they perceive their  real-life identity to be.  Because of this, they can trust the person with whom they're forming a relationship more.  They can rely on each other more and share more information, because the internet seems so nonthreatening.  I think that is a very metaphysical idea. 

On my last post, my friend Heather commented and made a wonderful connection.  She said "isn't it interesting that a poet who was known for his somewhat paradoxical metaphors has BECOME a metaphor in the new media debate...Donne expressed the human tendency to make creative comparisons. Now, we, as humans, are capable of LIVING these comparisons as we form strong relationships over a distance. It's a paradox... but we do it, and it works." 

I love this point, and I think this is definitely where I want to end up with my paper.  Because of social media, we are able to embody metaphysical relationship ideals that Donne could only write about.  But, of course, new media also has detrimental effects.  My friend Neal made a comment that maybe we're sacrificing older relationship ideals for new ones-like the couple that's constantly texting.  There's the complaint that we as a society are too "plugged-in" and it's effecting our sense of reality.  So, am I making too bold of an assertion?