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It's the day after Christmas, and we're all a bit tired. I am sitting at the computer, listening to a voice on the telephone.

"She didn't know how to turn it on. She turned on the monitor but not ... hello? are you there?"

The voice on the telephone had noticed, although I hadn't said a word, that my attention was back on the e-mail I had been reading when the telephone rang. It wasn't my noises -- they were the right ones in all the right places -- but how I was "there" somehow communicated that I had slipped away from the conversation.

I was trying to do too many things at the same time like an old Windows pc. When we do two things simultaneously, we take about thirty per cent of our attention off the primary task. Like the car last week that was wobbling in the roadway and almost hit me when I passed, making me turn to see a driver staring at a point in front of his gaze, speaking with animation on his cellphone.

All we're asked to do is stay present when talking to someone or even doing anything at all. But we do drift, don't we?

Civilization is a mediating structure designed to facilitate the exchange of energy and information. The new hardware -- the electronic infrastructure of our civilization -- is for the moment just a little bit in the way.

Electronic networks mediate communication. Yet no one thought of computers or telephones as personal communication devices when they were invented.

It is reported that Alexander Graham Bell, when asked how the telephone might be used, said, "Maybe you could call ahead to the next town to tell them a telegram is coming."

It is also reported that Western Union was not interested in the patent on the telephone because they believed the device had no practical value.

When the telephone was invented, the simulated voice sounded unnatural. Now we think we're talking to a "real person."

But there's no one there. The "space" in which we converse is cyberspace, the consensual hallucination defined by William Gibson, a space that doesn't exist until we make it up and act as if it's real. We're like mimes building walls in the air, then living in the rooms.

We know we're working in virtual space during a conference call or an online meeting. But we don't realize how much that has changed us even when we're face to face. Virtual meetings have changed how we relate to one another when we're all in the same room. We have been "virtualized" by our experience and have internalized the structures of relationship that has taught us.

Professional sports, for example.

When I was a child, I attended Chicago Cubs baseball games. I sat in the stands. I felt the weather. The game took place on a grass playing field with real ivy on the walls. We watched a scoreboard where a human being physically moved numbers each inning to keep score. During the game, we talked to each other.

I attended a professional basketball game the other day. The stadium was indoors. Huge video screens facing four directions demanded my attention. I tried to look under the screens at the players but there was no way to avoid those immense images hanging in front of my face. When the game started, it was easier to watch the players on the screen than on the court.

I knew the introductions of players would be loud, but I didn't expect the decibel level to remain high throughout the game. Even during halftime, the noise level was so loud I couldn't talk to my friends.

Between watching the game on television and watching the game at the stadium, there was little difference. Compared to my childhood experience, it felt like I wasn't at the game at all. I was at a digital simulation of the game. The simulation was inserted between myself and my own experience, even at the stadium.

Someone who attended their first large convention in decades might report a similar experience. They might feel as if they weren't at a convention at all but at a digital representation of a convention. The tiny image of a speaker far away at a tiny podium is dwarfed by video images all around the hall. The audio and video equipment often makes it impossible to see the speaker even when you try.

We bring our digital experience into a physical room as the psychological space in which to interact. It is a modular interface that we port into all our relationships, a consequence of "virtualization."

We had to learn how to stay present on the telephone and we have to learn how to stay present in and through computer networks. When I drifted away from the person on the telephone, I really drifted away from myself.

When I speak to an audience I try not to watch the next paragraph turning itself over in my mind like an index card because then I cease to be present. When I'm on the radio or communicating through this column, I often imagine a person listening or reading and stay present to that persona, focusing my energy and attention toward them.

Any meeting -- from a tete-a-tete to a convention -- is a structure for the exchange of information and energy, and we have to learn how to use mediating structures, including telephone systems and computer networks, not to hide, but to show up.

Presence is a gift, perhaps the only gift we have to offer. Energy and information ... is who we are and what we have to contribute. Hoarding our energy shrinks the soul, makes it look like a puckered prune. A black hole from which no light can escape.

I'm with Shaw. Life is a splendid torch, I want it to burn as brightly as it can before handing it on, and when I die, I want the fuel to be all used up.