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

1. A modern, “connected” individual
2. 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.