It would be easy to dismiss the rise of “social distance socializing” as a product of pure necessity, a stopgap until we are, hopefully, able to safely congregate in person again. But these online gatherings are the culmination of a much broader cultural shift: the revelation that so much of our lives is already lived online. What we might call our “digital bodies” — our online avatars, the words we write on Twitter or Facebook, the photos we post on Instagram — are not artificial projections of who we are into an artificial space, but rather part and parcel of our identities. Our “digital bodies” are as much part of us as our legs or our fingers. – The New York Times