THREE times this week I’ve heard someone refer to “a parallel world.” The first was on Sunday, when the wife of a college friend said that she did not pay much attention to the celebrity-media culture. My friend, a real estate investor, and his wife, a doctor, had left Manhattan for Darien, Conn., shortly after 9/11 and were raising two girls in a neighborhood of two-story Colonials and adjoining lawns. I had the distinct sense that she did not mind not knowing who Snooki was (nor did her husband or their elder child, a polite and articulate eighth grader with braids), but also that at one time she did not feel quite so separated from mass culture.

“I feel like I’m living in a parallel world,” she said.

On Monday morning, on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” I heard Mike Barnicle make a similar comment, although in the context of the Tucson shootings. The next day, I happened to be speaking to Barbara Vinken, a professor of French literature at the University of Munich and the author of “Fashion Zeitgeist,” when she referred to the Internet not merely as a parallel universe of self-created identities and opportunities, but as “a dark continent,” a place where people “more and more live rather than in the real world.”