D After too long on the Net, even a phone call can be a shock. My boyfriends Liverpudlian accent suddenly becomes too difficult to understand after his clear words on screen; a secretarys tone seems more rejecting than Id imagined it would be. Time itself becomes fluid—hours becomes minutes, and alternately seconds stretch into days. Week ends, once a highlight of my week, are now just two ordinary days. For the last three years, since I stopped working as a producer for Charlie Rose, I have done much of my work as a telecommuter. I submit(提交) articles and edit them by Email and communicate with colleagues on Internet mailing lists. My boyfriend lives in England, so much of our relationship is computermediated. If I desired, I could stay inside for weeks without wanting anything. I can order food, and manage my money, love and work. In fact, at times I have spent as long as three weeks alone at home, going out only to get mails and buy newspapers and groceries. I watched most of the blizzard of 96 on TV. But after a while, life itself begins to feel unreal. I start to feel as though Ive merged(融合) with my machines, taking data in, spitting them back out, just another node(波节) on the Net. Others on line report the same symptoms(症状). We start to strongly dislike the outside forms of socializing. Its like attending an A. A. meeting in a bar with everyone holding a halfsipped drink. We have become the Net opponents worst nightmare. What first seemed like a luxury, crawling from bed to computer, not worrying about hair, and clothes and face, has becomes avoidance(逃避), a lack of discipline. And once you start replacing real human contact with cyber interaction, coming back out of the cave can be quite difficult. At times, I turn on the television and just leave it to chatter in the background, something that Id never done previously. The voices of the programs relax me, but then Im jarred by the commercials. I find myself sucked in by soap operas, or needing to keep up with the latest news and the weather. “Dateline”, “Frontline”, “Nightline”, CNN, New York 1, every possible angle of every story over and over, and over, even when they are of no possible use to me. Work moves from foreground to background.

The underlined phrase “coming back out of cave” probably means （）.