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One might imagine, embracing a Cartesian rationalism, that once one has set aside biases, rejected dogmatism, and exhausted polemics, only truth will remain. Uninfluenced by any prejudgment and dedicated to a studied neutrality, one thereby comes to see most clearly the territory under observation. This is the epistemological gambit, embraced by both Hannah Zeavin and by Richard Frankel and Victor Krebs, who hope that their books, refusing to take sides, will generate the most perspicacious account of their subject matters. Notwithstanding some curious points of contact, those subject matters are quite distinct, and even the technique of impartiality is differently deployed from one book to the other. Zeavin's The Distance Cure suspends most judgment about technologically mediated forms of therapy in order to trace the post-Freudian lineage of such therapies and ponder their potential efficacies. Frankel and Krebs's Human Virtuality and Digital Life engages, by contrast, almost wholly in evaluative analysis, examining the radical transformations of the self under conditions of digital ubiquity, but that book institutes a neutrality by insisting that every story has at least two sides, and then making sure to narrate them all.
The consequences of avoiding polemics also play out differently in the tones and theses of the two books. Zeavin's mission is anti-elitist and even anti-hierarchical, quietly celebrating therapy by mail, radio therapy, telephone hotlines, email, web-based and chat-based therapy, and even bot-based therapy because these therapies bring mental health to the
masses or, rather, to almost anyone who wants it. The ready availability of low-cost, low-pressure, low-commitment, anytime, anywhere therapy is eminently more practical than the daily trudge to the psychoanalyst's clinical office and typically a lot easier on the wallet than the analyst's bill that somehow seems just as shocking every month (except August, of course). Zeavin demarcates the