the theme is that once the barriers of space have been eliminated, separation between people will be eliminated. If you can have tea in a different city every day, how long can you keep that up before you get numb to the wonders of modern civilization? The new focus becomes creating new places to visit rather than visiting the old world.
I also wonder -- if people had teleporters, I wonder how adventurous they'd get. I know a lot of people here would want to go do some pretty awesome things if they could teleport anywhere in the world for free. But I have a feeling a lot of people would just visit their "dream vacation" spot every single day until they had assimilated it into their routine.
Depending on the technology, I'd be very hesitant to step into a teleporter. Even if chance of failure would be negligible (aka lte getting in a car crash).
Cause, call me weird, but with my regular personal belief of "mind/consciousness as an emergent property of the body", if you'd transport a person, atom by atom, breaking it down, digitizing it, sending and rebuilding it, physically completely equivalent, functioning exactly the same for everybody observing it, having the exact same memories etc.
but how would it "feel" or be experienced from the perspective of the consciousness that gets disintegrated to bits? there is no way, not even in theory, to tell (in a vaguely analogous sort of as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide -- but without the quantum)
and if you could do this, couldnt you also rebuild the person twice or even more? which one would be "real"? all of them right? so, how could you merge them again? by throwing them both through a teleporter and only rebuilding one of them? wouldnt that be equivalent to just killing off the other?
however, if teleporting would consist of a sort of "portal" type technology that somehow stitches two parts of space together so you can pass through, I wouldn't have this issue with it, because you stay in one piece.