That is probably true. Maybe "lasting friendships" was not exactly what I meant, anyway; maybe "sustained interactions" would be more like it. I think about the way people in the past, like the Wright brothers with Octave Chanute, Jefferson and Madison, Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann, corresponded over decades, bouncing ideas off each other and honing their arguments, encouraging each other and keeping each other grounded in reality, and I don't know if that happens to the same extent today, even though it would be far easier and faster. Maybe I'm generalizing from outstanding examples in the past, and it never happened on a broad scale, but I'm inclined to think it did, and we're the weaker for not carrying it on.