Touch, smell, sound and look are no longer critical. Physical distance ceases its importance as well. In fact, the body no longer needs to exist. It seems now to be perfectly acceptable even to a non-religious person. Heaven and hell used to be the only places for pure souls, not any more.
Chatrooms are as well.
Files, browsers, emails, web pages, web servers, search engines, computers, routers, modems etc seem to acquire human characteristics far more easily than TV sets, cars, phones or refrigerators. I think the cold digital world is far easier to assimilate this way - after all we are also artifacts of some other unknown force. Today, we can create arbitrary number of multiple aliases to hide from aggressive marketers the fact that we visited certain web pages. Today, birth and death start and end our lives, tomorrow we will die and be reborn as often as perhaps we can change our passwords and aliases. Being unable to read Microsoft attachments today, is like having deficient hearing or being color blind.