The key to telephone support is to lead the person step by step through their interests. If they are strongly motiveated to do a particular thing, they will have a steep learning curve. We know that it's possible to be intimate online, to build a virtual community. We don't have to speculate about that, we have numerous instances. Knowing that its possible is not the same thing as prescribing virtual community as the solution for the ills of our society.
People see computers as alienating.
But if you want to talk about alienation and technology, let's talk about telephones. For that matter, let's talk about elevators, which made it possible for 50,000 people to work in the same 100-story building. Every technology of communication and transportation distances, at the same time as it connects. Plato believed that widespread literacy, the ability to write things down, would make people lazy and destroy the oral culture. There is one fellow active on the Well who is in an iron lung.