One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction. At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, "Do you have any controls?" Well the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, "Do you mean did I not operate on half of the patients?" The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room hesitantly replied, "Yes, that's what I had in mind." Then the visitor's fist really came down as he thundered, "Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death!" God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, "Which half?"
When we use non-spatial social apps, we often understand that another's cognitive presence is there, but we can't feel the more human presence we're wired to need. When we're not social distancing, we fulfill this need elsewhere, outside of software. We meet for coffee. We go on a walk. We play a game, or show a friend something funny on our phone and watch them laugh. We have infinite options at our disposal for relating to others. Though the lack of these same options inside the software we use is sometimes inconvenient, we can usually get over it.
But things are different right now. We're constrained to rely almost exclusively on software for social interaction. What are usually minor inconveniences in our existing applications are now the main factor preventing us from fulfilling our social needs.