Who am I when I'm all alone?

"Neither intimacy nor solitude is quite what it used to be" writes Lidija Haas (LRB 23 Feb 12).  I go through withdrawal when my cellphone is far away.  When it's near, I can't concentrate for long.  If I'm reading the Iliad, even this edited version by Mitchell, I wonder when the next email or text is coming, or if I should look up more about Deiphobus or Idomeneus.

Haas explains, "The network we now carry around with us saves time yet uses up much more of it. It makes us so available to each other that sometimes we need to withdraw, but the result is that neither intimacy nor solitude is quite what it used to be."

Her essay recalls for me the times I could spend hours with lego or crayons learning who I am:
"With a doll, even the most imaginative child knows that he or she is playing alone.  The prototype for My Real Baby was designed to cry out in pain when handled roughly, but when Hasbro put it into mass production they decided that it should instead shut down in such situations, so as not to 'enable' sadistic behaviour.  Nobody would want 'to see their children tormenting a screaming baby,' but what might they learn from one that doesn’t react to torture?"

Our toys, our phones, our gadgets, they're all so "thoughtful" on their own, what are really our own thoughts.  Just as Google knows what you're thinking as you're typing a search, and as a result, you don't know what you really wanted, just so the doll that cries, or the coloring book that has a drawing premade, or phone that interrupts your thoughts every few minutes -- who knows who I am when I'm all alone?