But anonymity is a basic early assumption of online presence that will largely go away (for instance, Facebook is the next step of maturity because you don’t use “shaggy255″ as your name – more on that in the future).

As for the phone vs. in-person: what you’re detecting, if I’m gonna go with McLuhan, is the difference in resolution on your media. Phone is a low-resolution media (he would use ‘hot’ or ‘cold’) that requires our brains to fill in a lot of gaps (where are they sitting? what is their facial expression?). Hi-res (“hot”) mediums immerse you completely in a world, and are much higher functioning.