this cocooned shut-in thing already happened in Japan didn't, decades ago, they had a word for it, i can't remember - it was a whole phenomenon, young men completely cut off, spending all day playing video games
Baudrillard talked about the home of the future as being like a satellite - connected to the world by streams of telemetry - TV, etc etc
Actually Borges, prescient fucker that he was, imagined something like this in his 1949 fable "The Aleph" - on the connected man of the future, "I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins.”
i think the positive way of looking way at some of this would be say that it's a new form of postgeographical socialising - intensified in some areas (intellection, potential for acrimony), diminished in others (face to face, haptic, getting drunk, base-level civility restraints where you're in someone's presence )
perhaps we should all drink while posting on Dissensus
(maybe some of us are)
actually writing something at the moment about the changing notion of the neighbourhood, how your neighbours are determined by taste, sensibility, interests, politics etc, and they're not living next door, they're living... well, somewhere like this
that's why i started addressing my blog readers as "parishioners"