" Meanwhile, Fortune's David Kirkpatrick mused on the iPod phenomenon, declaring that a little isolation isn't necessarily such a bad thing: "Why do I, and so many others, want to cocoon ourselves off into our little music bubbles, even when we're out and about?

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It took all my energy simply to lift my mosquito net and crawl into its cocoon.

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"It's like a butterfly going back into the cocoon and becoming a caterpillar again, " he said.

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We felt as if after an excursion to the big, vibrant Gotham to the north, we were going back into our cocoon.

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Every day on my radio show, I hear of people withdrawing from the political arena into a cocoon of disengagement and discouragement.

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This requires mastering not only safe takeoffs and landings, among thousands of other skills and procedures, but also integrating their carriers into the cocoon of destroyers and submarines needed to protect it.

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They withdrew into the comfortable cocoon Paterno wrapped around his program.

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But I've been around others who were so into their fame they couldn't see anyone outside their protective cocoon not as long as they had fans coming up to them, because then they knew they still existed.

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