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Sherry Turkle thinks that the crucial characteristic of a life lived online is the desire for control over where we place our attention. As she argued in March of this year, those of us with connected devices bursting out of every pocket want nothing so much as to be where we are not; to pay attention only to the bits of experience, whether real or online, that most interest us. “Across the generations,” she says, “I see that people can’t get enough of each other – if and only if they can have each other at a distance, in amounts they can control. I call it the Goldilocks effect. Not too close, not too far, just right.”