ANTHONY WEINER, New York's most recently disgraced congressman , contacted and corresponded with many women via social media, e-mail and text message. By all accounts, these ladies never actually met the man. As Mr Weiner steps down from his political post and possibly seeks some therapy, it's worth exploring some of the implications of his behaviour, and what it says about the technology that now surrounds us.

Facebook and Twitter are nascent tools; text messaging is still a somewhat new phenomenon and even e-mail is only a blip on the screen when compared with our long history of snail mail. As a society we adopt these tools to the point of indispensability, and only rarely consider how we are more fundamentally affected by them.

Social media, texting and e-mail all make it much easier to communicate, gather and impart information, but they also present some dangers. By removing any real human engagement, they enable us to cultivate our narcissism without the risk of disapproval or criticism. To use a theatrical metaphor, these new forms of communication provide a stage on which we can each create our own characters, hidden behind a fourth wall of tweets and status updates, of texts and pings. This illusory state of detachment can become addictive as we isolate ourselves a safe distance from the cruelty of our fleshly lives, where we are flawed, powerless and inconsequential. In essence, we have been provided not only the means to be more free, but also to become new, to create and project a more perfect self to the world. As we become more reliant on these tools, they become more a part of our daily routine, and so we become more entrenched in this illusion. As Jean Baudrillard might have put it, this alternative world is "more real than the real."

So it is that we live in an impersonal era, where names and faces represent two different levels of intimacy, where working relationships occur solely through the magic of email and where love can flourish or fizzle through text message. An environment such as this reduces interpersonal relationships to mere digital transactions. Social media, e-mail, text messaging—they all have that rare quality, like a narcotic, to be both the cause and the solution to a problem.

Would Mr Weiner have been so emboldened to contact Ginger Lee, a porn-star, and a whole coterie of other women if he had had to do it in person? Doubtful. It seems he might have been lost in a fantasy world that allowed him to present himself as something quite different from his public self. Ultimately he was lulled into believing his digital self could abide by different stakes, as if he could continually push the boundaries of what's acceptable without facing the consequences of "real life."

Poor Anthony must never have taken into account these sound words from Kurt Vonnegut in his novel "Mother Night": "We are who we pretend to be. So we must be careful who we pretend to be."