Doesn’t it happen to you that whenever you communicate with someone online, in an only-written form, you don’t think of them as actual people with a body? Incorporeal beings, conscious minds sending collections of bits to each other.
I know it happens to me, even with close friends I haven’t seen for a long time. I can exchange messages for months with someone, and then I suddenly realize I haven’t thought of that person in their physical materialization for a while. At work, I’ve been helping people from my organization for a few years without even knowing what some of them look like, and, of course, I can have conversations on the internet with a person I’ve never seen: they’re someone, and they are no one simultaneously.
How one’s perception of others is affected when one sees them only through words and sentences (emojis at most) seems to be called depersonalization.
The underlying process is that depersonalization makes it less likely that others are perceived as individuals with a range of idiosyncratic characteristics and ways of behaving.
Source
I will soon see some people I’m very close with, but haven’t seen in six years. They are now deep into my depersonalization area, as I am in theirs, and I wonder what the back-to-physical-shape experience will be like for us all.