Ractives

I was really interested on the discussion we had on Tuesday about Nell and the Primer.  What really interested me was the question about when Nell the girl is distinguished from Nell the Primer character (or somethign like that).  I kept thinking about Miranda and the ractives.  You could almost ask the same question about Miranda or any other ractive.  When she is inside her "egshell" she takes on different characters and personas.  Sure, she reads from a prompter for most of it but it is still what she puts into each character that makes them unique.  When does Mirnda the person separate from Miranda the character.  And to take things further, it seems that someone could so wrapped up in these ractives that they lose all sense of time.  Miranda even loses track of time during a session with Nell and realizes that she'd been going "eight hours without a break" (136).  She doesn't realize until after the session that she is parched and hasn't used the loo for hours.  She got so wrapped up in the character that she lost touch with her own body.  The question then becomes whether or not a person could get so wrapped up in a ractive world that they completely lose touch with reality and get lost in ractive and believe it to be the only world.  What would happen then?  In this alternate reality would it be possible for people to only live in ractives?  How much would people depend on these machines to interact with others and would ractives take the place of actual human contact?  The reference to Surrogates also came up in class and in a way it is similar to ractives.  People play different parts from the safety of these "eggshells" while their own body is safe from direct interaction.  The problem arises when people would only use these ractives to interact.  Is that the kind of world we will come to someday?