Quote

People in this world of superficial communication find themselves isolated and lonely and have difficult in talking about personal things that really matter to them.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

Some people are just quiet - they don't need to be talking all the time and aren't extroverted, but they're not necessarily afraid to talk. I'm not really a shy person.

People love having a home. People love going to their house and sleeping in their bedroom and having a conversation around the dinner table. You don't particularly think of that conversation as a private conversation; you just think of it as something that happened in your home.

Look at all those unattractive people talking about depraved things all day long on TV talk shows. People can talk about themselves, yet the art of conversation, which has to do with sharing, is disappearing. I feel as though I am chasing a runaway locomotive.

We've become much more casual and much more relaxed in social interactions, where there was a formality and maybe a kind of respect at that time that doesn't exist now.

Think about back in the day when we had Archie Bunker, 'The Jeffersons.' We had stuff to sit down and share and laugh at. The Internet has made it so we don't have to sit together anymore. It's so self-absorbed. No one has to talk to each other anymore, and people don't realize that that is killing us.

I was a very shy and introverted person, and it was hard for me to talk to people and make relationships.

Most of us yearn for really intimate, healthy, in-person relationships. People have a deep desire to be understood, to be told that it's OK, that you're not isolated and broken, that this is part of the human challenge, and that there is hope. The capacity for online interactions to do that is powerful.

What we've tried to do is have neighbors, colleagues, friends and family talking.