Reach out & touch someone...

We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind.  An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business.  Even within the family Americans are unique in their feeling that each member should have a separate room, and even a separate telephone, television, and car when economically possible.  We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it. (PSlater, 1970)