When I’m online, I’m alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.

The sentence punctures the metaphor of cyberspace as a shared “place.” Stoll reduces online life to its material basics: a lone body in a room, repetitive keystrokes, and a glowing CRT. The effect is deliberately deflationary—reminding readers that mediated connection can coincide with physical isolation. It also gestures to a broader argument: that information access is not the same as human presence, and that digital interaction can thin out the social, sensory, and civic dimensions of communication. Read today, it captures a transitional moment in computing history, when networked life was expanding but still visibly tethered to stationary, solitary hardware.