 Coyne (1995), drawing on the work of Heidegger, argues that the proximity of community has nothing to do with physical distance. He argues that proximity is rather a matter of shared concerns—i.e., my family is ‘close’ to me even if they are a thousand miles away and my neighbors may be ‘distant’ to me even if they are next door. Levinas (1991, 1996) takes this claim even further. He suggests that proximity has nothing to do with either social or geographic distance. For him proximity is an ethical urgency that unsettles our egocentric existence. Proximity is the face—or our always already facing—of the Other (all other human beings) that unsettles the ongoing attempts by the ego to ‘domesticate’ the infinitely singular Other (a proper name) into familiar categories (race, ethnicity, gender, etc). For the phenomenologist any electronic communication (or any other communication) will find its meaning in a prior horizon of proximity. If we do not already share certain concerns then electronic mediation will not create proximity even if it does seem to break down the geographic distances between us—even if it is ‘shrinking’ the world as it were. These authors suggest that our sense of community and the moral reciprocity it implies comes from a sustained and situated engagement where mutual commitments and obligations are secured in the proximity of an already shared horizon of ongoing meaning. In a similar vain Silverstone (2002, 2003) argues, drawing on the work of Levinas, for the importance of maintaining a ‘proper distance’ in which proximity and responsibility are maintained. He argues that in the modern world of the Internet and increased mobility the stranger becomes ‘my neighbour’: ‘and we are all neighbours to one another now’. In the mediated world we become inundated with the solicitations of the multitude of others that increasingly appear on our screens. How ought we to respond? We cannot allow the world, reconstituted through the new media, to turn into mere images, pixels on the screen. We must recognize: ‘that I have as much responsibility for the stranger, that other who is either, physically or metaphysically, far from me, as I do for my neighbour’ (Silverstone 2003: 480). Thus, according to Silverstone the ambiguity of a world of ‘closeness’ and simultaneous ‘distance’ of the other that the new media constitute is an altogether different way of being with others that requires a new ethic of ‘proper distance’ where the possibility of facing the other, as Other, is not lost in the ethereality of our clicks. It is clear from these examples that the ethical question for phenomenology is mostly also an ontological question—that is, what sort of world or way of being are we becoming, as opposed to the sort of world we value and want? The phenomenologists would argue that these fundamental choices may only become visible if we approach new media and ICT (and the ethics they imply) from a phenomenological point of view.