Take any given person (even yourself, if you’d like), and ask the following:
Does he/she exhibit traces of
- Impaired social skills (social interaction),
- Impaired communicative abilities,
- Restricted interests, and/or
- Repetitive behavior.
If you answered yes to a majority of those characteristics, you are either
- A modern, “connected” individual
- Autistic
As Janet Maslin points out in a book review entitled, “So Plugged in, Yet So Disconnected: Field Notes from Wired America,” perhaps the most valuable aspect of Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, U.S.A. was buried in a footnote: the observation of a “connection between social disembodiment and rising rates of autism, a condition that defies the conventions of social networking.”
The similarities between autism and “our isolating, newly normal adult behavior are related” are frightening, indeed.