Brave new world

Denise Calls Up is a 1995 movie that looks presciently to a generation that would prefer texting as the primary mode of communication and contact with their fellow humans, while even phone conversations would become too humanly intimate.

We are living in the midst of such a generation, as Stanley Fish points out in the context of the hegemony of the digital culture that's permeated the way all institutions, including institutions of higher learning, function.

Fish pulls the 90s movie out of the archives and outlines the plot:

Its conceit is that a bunch of supposedly close friends never meet; they know one another only through electronic media. Physical encounters are threatened, but never occur. Everyone pledges to come to a party, but no one shows up. There is a pregnancy, but the father is a sperm donor whose only contact with the mother is through the phone call of the title.

The culture of the movie, Six Degrees of Separations, seems like so cro-magnon by contrast.