Toddler disables iPad until 2067

Try again in 25 million minutes . . .

"The House of the Rising Sun" over the years

Leadbelly, 1944:



Frijid Pink, 1970:



Old computer equipment, 2011:

Steve Jobs has died at 56.

Steve Jobs died today due to pancreatic cancer, just over a month after he resigned as CEO of Apple.

The Apple.com homepage is now a tribute to Jobs.

The first sentence of the New York Times' obituary:

Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday.

In any obituary thread on Metafilter, people normally post a period to represent a moment of silence for someone who has died. Many commenters today are posting an Apple logo instead. (You'll only see them if you're using a Mac.)

Searching through the Metafilter thread shows that several different commenters have used the word "aesthetic." For example, this comment:

Thank you for all the pretty computers. Meaning, thank you for thinking about design and style and what the rest of us out here had to look at and touch every day. Apple has forced the rest of the industry to think just a little bit more about the aesthetic of the consumer experience, which I appreciate.

Many comments also use the word "beautiful":

Steve Jobs believed the revolutionary idea that the tools you use should be as beautiful as the work you produce with them.

The New York Times quotes a Twitter post:

RIP Steve Jobs. You touched an ugly world of technology and made it beautiful.

A few years ago I was having a conversation about computers with an acquaintance who seemed to know more about them than I did. I had made it clear that I was a lifelong Mac user (with one small exception). He tried to explain why he preferred PCs to Macs. He said something along the lines of: "All Apple does is give computer users exactly what they want." Amazingly, he meant that as a criticism of Macs — for being too user-friendly and appealing. My response: "Gee, if that's all Apple does, isn't that enough?"

As I mentioned, there was only one exception to my lifelong devotion to Macs. In my first semester of law school, I had to use a PC. In order to take an exam on your computer you had to use the specific exam-taking software provided by the school, and it wasn't Mac-compatible. (Handwritten exams are allowed, but that isn't a viable option since you don't get any extra time.) At the beginning of the next semester, my law school announced that the software had been updated to be Mac-compatible. I was so frustrated by my bad luck — I can't get a new computer when I just bought a computer 4 months ago that's working fine, can I? Of course, as a first-year law student, I wasn't earning any money. I apologetically asked my mom if she could pay for a new Macbook for me, saying "I know I just got a computer . . ." but starting to explain why I thought the Mac's improvement over the PC would be worth it. She cut me off, saying: "I know exactly what you mean. You don't even need to explain it." (I got the Mac and sold the PC to another student — which wasn't hard, since I had the perfect explanation of why I wanted to sell a perfectly good computer.)

If you're a Mac user, you might not be able to put into words why using a Mac is so important. You just know.

The New York Times quotes Jobs:

He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

The New York Times adds:

As the gravity of his illness became known, and particularly after he announced he was stepping down, he was increasingly hailed for his genius and true achievement: his ability to blend product design and business market innovation by integrating consumer-oriented software, microelectronic components, industrial design and new business strategies in a way that has not been matched.

A commenter in the Metafilter thread says:

I just told my wife, who is completely disconnected from the geek world where I live, that Steve Jobs was dead.

When I told her, she accidentally dropped her iPad 2 on the hard floor but it did not break. It didn't have a scratch on it.

I think that says something about this man who demanded and delivered excellence.

As I recently blogged and as many people are quoting today, Jobs had this to say about life and death in his commencement address to Stanford University in 2005:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

(Photo from this website via Google image search.)

Steve Jobs on life and death

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple.

Something is starting to creep me out about advertising in general, and Apple's advertising in particular.

I've been feeling more and more unnerved by how advertisers abstract away from so many of the fascinating details that make people who they are, and hand us dull, cartoonish, predictable stereotypes that we're supposed to aspire to.

Apple just announced its new operating system, Lion, and I can't focus on the new features because I'm distracted by how insidiously Apple-like the advertising images are.

Apple ads promise a world with perfect racial and gender diversity — but almost no other kind of diversity.

No one is significantly overweight or underweight; everyone's moderately slim.

There are no same-sex couples.

Only a few different ages seem to be allowed: everyone's either 7, 17, or 27.

And of course, everyone has the same expression all the time.

I assume they did a focus group and found that seeing an abundant amount of diversity in the race and gender categories somehow makes us feel better about a world where people are homogeneous in every other way.

Computers are wonderful and horrible - the view from 1982

Here's another gem from the Atlantic's project of digging up old technology articles from its archives: a 1982 article by James Fallows (who still writes for the magazine) called "Living with a Computer."

The Atlantic's blog post about the article points out how obsolete the references to companies are now, as they've since been the victim of creative destruction:

Nearly all the companies building system components that Fallows mentioned are gone or bit players now: Optek, Ball Corporation . . . , Lanier, Wang, Digital Research, Heath-Zenith, Victor. As Fallows noted, it was like the automobile industry of 1910, "a thousand little hustlers trying to claim a piece of the action." Neither Apple nor Microsoft made it onto his radar.

I find it fascinating to read Fallows describing his encounters with a machine we use all the time without thinking about it, back when this was such a novel experience that it merited a lengthy essay in the Atlantic. I'm tempted to copy and paste the whole article into this blog post, but that would be inappropriate. Here's the gist of it:

I'd sell my computer before I'd sell my children. But the kids better watch their step. When have the children helped me meet a deadline? When has the computer dragged in a dead cat it found in the back yard?

The Processor Technology SOL-20 came into my life when Darlene went out. It was a bleak, frigid day in January of 1979, and I was finishing a long article for this magazine. The final draft ran for 100 pages, double-spaced. Interminable as it may have seemed to those who read it, it seemed far longer to me, for through the various stages of composition I had typed the whole thing nine or ten times. My system of writing was to type my way through successive drafts until their ungainliness quotient declined. This consumed much paper and time. In the case of that article, it consumed so much time that, as the deadline day drew near, I knew I had no chance of retyping a legible copy to send to the home office.

I turned hopefully to the services sector of our economy. I picked a temporary-secretary agency out of the phone book and was greeted the next morning by a gum-chewing young woman named Darlene. I escorted her to my basement office and explained the challenge. The manuscript had to leave my house by 6:30 the following evening. No sweat, I thought, now that a professional is on hand.

But five hours after Darlene's arrival, I glanced at the product of her efforts. Stacked in a neat pile next to the typewriter were eight completed pages. This worked out to a typing rate of about six and a half words per minute. In fairness to Darlene, she had come to a near-total halt on first encountering the word "Brzezinski" and never fully regained her stride. Still, at this pace Darlene and I would both be dead—first I'd kill her, then I'd kill myself—before she came close to finishing the piece. Hustling her out the door at the end of the day, with $49 in wages in her pocket and eleven pages of finished manuscript left behind, I trudged downstairs to face the typewriter myself. Twenty-four hours later, I handed the bulky parcel to the Federal Express man and said, "Never again."

Over the next few weeks, my thoughts often drifted to the advertisements I had seen in airline magazines, in which trim and cheerful secretaries effortlessly produced documents by typing in front of computer screens. Were these devices real? I checked with a salesman for a company called Lanier and discovered that while their word-processing system, called "No Problem," was quite real, it cost some $15,000. If I had drawn a pie chart representing my annual income, No Problem would have been a very large piece of pie. I called Wang, Digital Equipment, and some of the other big-name manufacturers and got roughly the same news. If I called the same manufacturers today, I'd hear much more encouraging news, but my options were to start writing shorter articles, go into hock, or take my chances again with Darlene.

The way out of my dilemma came from an unexpected quarter. My father-in-law often dealt with inventors who put together computer systems to monitor various industrial processes, and he thought that one of them might have the answer. On his advice, I followed a trail of leads and suggestions that eventually led me to a converted church in the farmlands of central Ohio. There, Bill Cavage, Marv Monroe, and Bill Jones, three young engineers doing business as the Optek Corporation, tinkered with disk drives, photo-sensors, and other devices in hopes of making the big sale. Optek's specialty is making machines like the one they produce for drug companies, which counts pills as they pass by at a rate of 24,000 per minute and kicks out any bottles that receive the wrong number of pills. For men who can do all this, I thought, turning a small computer into a word-processing system should be a cinch.

For a while, I was a little worried about what they would come up with, especially after my father-in-law called to ask how important it was that I be able to use both upper- and lower-case letters. But finally, for a total of about $4,000, Optek gave me the machinery I have used happily to this day.

The ingredients were the basic four of any word-processing system. First was the computer itself, the Processor Technology SOL-20. Its detailed specifications—its 48K of random access memory, its Intel 8080 microprocessing chip—are now of antiquarian interest, since Processor Technology went out of business several months after I bought my computer.

The second element in my system was the monitor, a twelve-inch TV screen. Some monitors are like black-and-white TVs; mine—which, oddly enough, was produced by the same company, Ball Corporation, that makes home-canning supplies, displays light-green letters against a background of dark green and is supposed to be easier on the eyes. Third was the external storage device—the equipment that saves the documents you've written when the computer is turned off. The equipment I chose, two small tape recorders, was such a complete disaster that I must discuss it separately later on. Fourth was the printer, a ponderous machine, built like a battleship, which had been an IBM Selectric typewriter before it was converted to accept printing instructions from a computer.

These four machines, and the yards and yards of multi-strand cable that connected them, were the hardware of my system. The software consisted of a program called The Electric Pencil, with a manual explaining the mysteries of "block move," "home cursor," and "global search and replace."

I skip past the day during which I thought the computer didn't work at all (missing fuse) and the week or two it took me to understand all the moves The Electric Pencil could make. From that point on, I knew there was a heaven.

What was so exciting? Merely the elimination of all drudgery, except for the fundamental drudgery of figuring out what to say, from the business of writing. The process works this way.

When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen. For six months, I found it awkward to compose first drafts on the computer. Now I can hardly do it any other way. It is faster to type this way than with a normal typewriter, because you don't need to stop at the end of the line for a carriage return (the computer automatically "wraps" the words onto the next line when you reach the right-hand margin), and you never come to the end of the page, because the material on the screen keeps sliding up to make room for each new line. It is also more satisfying to the soul, because each maimed and misconceived passage can be made to vanish instantly, by the word or by the paragraph, leaving a pristine green field on which to make the next attempt.

My computer has a 48K memory. Since each K represents 1,024 bytes of information—each byte representing one character or digit—the machine can manipulate more than 49,000 items of information at a time. In practice, after allowing for the space that The Electric Pencil's programming instructions occupy in the computer's memory, the machine can handle documents 6,500 to 7,500 words long, or a little longer than this article. I break anything longer into chunks or chapters and work with them one at a time.

When I've finished with such a chunk, I press another series of buttons and store what I have written on my disk drive. This is a cigar-box-shaped unit that sits next to my computer, connected through a shocking-pink ribbon cable containing thirty-four separate strands. Inside the drive is the floppy disk, which is essentially magnetic recording tape pressed into the shape of a small record and then enclosed in a square cardboard envelope, 5 1/4 inches on each side. The system transfers data from the computer to the disk, or vice versa, at about 1,000 words per second, so it is no nuisance to pause after each fifteen or twenty minutes of writing to store what I've just done. Each of the disks in my system can hold about 100K of information, or more than twice as much as a full load from the computer memory. If one disk is full, I pull it out and snap another in.

When I finish what I'm working on, I switch on my printer. If I'm sending a letter, I load the stationery into the printer and push the print button, and then fish each piece of paper out of the printer when it is done. There are machines that automatically feed single sheets of paper into the printer, but that takes us back to big slices of the income pie. If I am printing a draft of an article, I can hook up my tractor feed, push the print button, and go out for a beer. The tractor pulls an endless sheet of paper through the printer—and the perforated paper can be separated into pages when the printing is done, so it looks like a normal manuscript.

The system prints about thirty characters per second, which means it takes less than a minute per double-spaced page. When it has completed its work, I take the manuscript and start working it over with a pencil, just as I did in days of old. The difference is that after I've made my changes, I have only to type in the changes I have made and start the printer up again—rather than retype the whole mess.

None of this may sound impressive to those who have fleets of secretaries at their disposal, or to writers who can say precisely what they mean the first time through. Isaac Asimov recently complained in Popular Computing that his word-processor didn't save him much time on revisions, since he composes at ninety words per minute and "95 per cent of what I write in the first draft stays in the second [and final] draft." My first-draft survival ratio is closer to one percent, so for me the age of painless revisions is a marvel.

You won't catch me saying that my machine has made me a better writer, but I don't think it has made me any worse. Since I now spend less time and energy retyping, I have more left over for editing and rewriting.

I think he's basically right, and if anything he's understating how much of a boon computers have been to the writing and editing process. They don't make writing quicker at the expense of quality; they improve the quality by allowing you to write and edit more quickly.

He then describes a strange way to use technology to improve editing, which I had never heard of:

When I think I'm finished with an article, I set the print speed to Slow. This runs the printer at about 100 words per minute, or roughly the pace of reading aloud. I stuff my ears with earplugs and then lean over the platen as the printing begins. Watching the article printed at this speed is like hearing it read; infelicities are more difficult to ignore than when you are scooting your eye over words on a page.

More:

I have not yet stooped to the politician's trick of programming the computer to write standard letters of reply. I have, however, discovered a few other sneaky word-processing feats. Suppose you are writing an article in which an unusual word appears frequently—let us choose "Brzezinski" once again. When writing the draft, you simply type a certain character, say * or + , each time Brzezinski should appear, and then when you're ready to print you signal the computer to insert "Brzezinski" in place of the character.

Imagine thinking that this keyboard shortcut was so devious it was worth mentioning in the same breath as having an artificial-intelligence ghostwriter!

He also used a precursor to TurboTax:

In addition to The Electric Pencil, I bought the software for a computer-programming language known as BASIC . . . . When I want to know how many prime numbers there are between one million and two million, or how quickly my mortgage payments would bankrupt me if interest rates rose to 35 percent—that is, when I don't want to do my work—I can kill ten minutes writing programs to tell me the answer. Getting down to business, I use the computer to do my income tax. My economic life is a mess of $2.75 parking-lot tickets and $13.89 lunch receipts, which used to pile up like fall leaves until I spent a week burrowing through them at income-tax time. Now all I do is sit down at the machine for five minutes every few nights and type in all transactions of interest to the tax man—so much in from my employers, so much out to the credit-card company. At the end of the year, I load the income-tax program into the computer, push the button marked "Run," and watch as my tax return is prepared. Since it took me only about six months to learn BASIC (and the tax laws) well enough to write the program, I figure this approach will save me time by 1993.

Fallows goes on to discuss a long litany of technical issues that are now happily irrelevant to us. Should you use tapes or disks to store your information? If you use disks, should they be 5 1/2 or 8 inches in diameter? And should they have "single-density" or "double-density storage"? Fallows reports that he bought two 5 1/2-inch disks, but was frustrated that "each disk fills up too quickly and I have to keep rotating different disks in and out of the drive."

He admits that his computer has caused serious problems:

For one, it creates yet another reason to feel vulnerable to the workings of fate.

Shortly after I got my machine, I was typing away in the basement as a summer thunderstorm moved into town. Knowing what I now know, these days I immediately shut off the machine and unplug it from the wall whenever thunder is reported any nearer than West Virginia. But I was not so wise then. I had turned on the printer and gone upstairs when a bolt of lightning struck the house. There was a huge boom, and a white flash outside windows on all sides of our house. Several million volts coursed through our wiring and blew out nearly every electrical appliance that was plugged in. The blast burned out a clothes iron, and if it had that effect on a big hunk of steel, you can imagine what went on in the computer's delicate interior. For a month I was machine-less, thrown back on my Smith-Corona, while computer repairmen replaced one silicon chip after another that had melted in its casing.

Computers cause another, more insidious problem, by forever distorting your sense of time. When I first saw the system in the back room at Optek, I was so dazzled by the instantaneous deletion of sentences and movement of paragraphs that I thought I could never want anything more. When the scientists at Optek warned me about certain bottlenecks, I had to stifle my laughter. In particular, they warned me that I might grow impatient with tape recorders as a way to store data. You have to understand, they told me, it can take five or ten minutes to load a long draft into the computer from tapes, whereas a disk drive (which would add a thousand dollars to the cost) could do the job in seconds. Typical vulgarians of the machine age, I told myself. How could they imagine that I would object to five or ten minutes, when I had been spared Darlene?

Three weeks later, I was griping constantly about the tapes and scanning the pages of Byte magazine, looking for a good deal on a disk drive. Ten minutes was intolerable when everything else happened in a flash. Worse, the tapes had the fatal defect of unreliability; even after waiting ten minutes, you were never quite sure that the information was safely stored. The only way to tell was to try to feed the data back from the tapes into the computer, which took another ten minutes and often led to the infuriating message "Tape Error." After one article disappeared forever behind a thicket of Tape Errors, I scraped up $800 for a cut-rate disk drive. Now my discontent is awakened only when I read stories about the new disks—larger ones that hold twice as much data as mine, and double-density models that hold twice as much as that.

I CAN HARDLY BRING myself to mention the true disadvantage of computers, which is that I have become hopelessly addicted to them. To the outside world, I present myself as a man with a business need for a word-processing machine. Sure, I have a computer: I'd have a drill press if I were in the machine-tool business. This is the argument I make frequently to my wife. The truth, which she has no doubt guessed, is that I love to see them work.

I nearly destroyed my health, to say nothing of my marriage, during the months when I switched off The Electric Pencil at ten or eleven at night-and then switched on BASIC and spent a few hours refining a tax-and-accounting system. At first my goal was merely to design a program that would work, that wouldn't print "Syntax Error in Line 2140" when I tried to run it. Then I started playing around, seeing if I could work out a scheme for financial projections that would take care of estimated tax payments to the IRS. Would it have been easier to mail in the $150 each quarter and then square accounts with the IRS at the end of the year? Of course—but that was not the point. Eventually, I aspired even to elegant programming, designing the matrices and the nested loops in a way that added the beauty of simplicity to the scheme.

When I contemplate my future with computers, my emotions are mixed. Because time and progress have passed my machine by, I simply can't buy any new programs for the SOL. They don't exist. This is a source of unending frustration: how I'd love to use a new word-processing program, one that could insert footnotes at the bottom of the proper page or automatically prepare an index for a book. How I'd love to get VisiCalc or SuperCalc or one of the other accounting systems that can turn a home computer into a miniature version of the National Bureau of Economic Research. How deprived I feel as I read the fliers for CompuServe and The Source, the over-the-phone services that enable you to make airline reservations, call up old newspaper articles, and send computer mail, all from the privacy of your home. How I wish my employers would install computers in their headquarters, so I could submit articles over the telephone, one computer to another, instead of fighting the crowds at the Express Mail window.

Yet even as I think these thoughts, I fear their fulfillment. My computer already competes with wife and children for my affection: can our family stand anything more? The question will remain moot until the price of replacement computers comes down a little more—or until I succeed in convincing my wife that she, too, needs a computer, so I can give her mine and rush out to buy a new one for myself (for business purposes, of course).

He ends by telling us of his shockingly modest hope "for a world in which my sons can grow up to have a better computer than their father had." Uh, yeah!



(Photo of my brother by me.)

How the iPhone helps a blind person...

. . . see?

From that blog post (via):

I have seen a lot of technology for the blind, and I can safely say that the iPhone represents the most revolutionary thing to happen to the blind for at least the last ten years. Fifteen or twenty years brings us back to the Braille ‘n Speak, which I loved in the same way, so have a hard time choosing the greater. In my more excitable moments, I consider the iPhone as the greatest thing to have ever happened to the blind, and it may prove so. . . . The touchpad offers the familiar next/previous motion which the blind need, since speech offers one-dimensional output. Adding the ability to touch anywhere on the screen and hear it adds a whole other dimension, literally. For the first time, the blind can actually get spacial information about something. In the store, Mom could say “Try that button” and I could. Blind people know what I mean. How many times has a sighted person said “I see an icon at the top of the screen?” Now, that actually Means something. . . .

The other night, . . . a very amazing thing happened. I downloaded an app called Color ID. It uses the iPhone’s camera, and speaks names of colors. It must use a table, because each color has an identifier made up of 6 hexadecimal digits. This puts the total at 16777216 colors, and I believe it. Some of them have very surreal names, such as Atomic Orange, Cosmic, Hippie Green, Opium, and Black-White. These names in combination with what feels like a rise in serotonin levels makes for a very psychedelic experience.

I have never experienced this before in my life. I can see some light and color, but just in blurs, and objects don’t really have a color, just light sources. When I first tried it at three o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t figure out why it just reported black. After realizing that the screen curtain also disables the camera, I turned it off, but it still have very dark colors. Then I remembered that you actually need light to see, and it probably couldn’t see much at night. I thought about light sources . . . . First, I saw one of my beautiful salt lamps in its various shades of orange, another with its pink and rose colors, and the third kind in glowing pink and red.. I felt stunned.

The next day, I went outside. I looked at the sky. I heard colors such as “Horizon,” “Outer Space,” and many shades of blue and gray. I used color [cues] to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house. My mind felt blown. I watched the sun set, listening to the colors change as the sky darkened. The next night, I had a conversation with Mom about how the sky looked bluer tonight. Since I can see some light and color, I think hearing the color names can help nudge my perception, and enhance my visual experience. Amazing!

What were the earliest hints of the internet as we know it?

Here are a few, in reverse chronological order:

1. A 1981 report on "electronic journalism" -- or, "newspapers by computer."

"We're not in it to make money." Good thinking!

At the end, the newscaster reports that it takes 2 hours to transmit the full text of a newspaper, which costs $5 an hour. She concludes that electronic journalism clearly "won't be much competition" for traditional newspapers.




2. A 1969 vision of online shopping, complete with soothingly traditional gender roles:




3. Reader comments in the 17th through 19th centuries. That Slate article is largely based on a book from 1995 -- before the world wide web became widely used -- called News for All by Thomas C. Leonard. The article quotes Leonard's thesis: "'When Americans chose the news, they were often not simply thinking of stories they wished to read; they were thinking of another reader.'"

The article goes on:

Leonard's example is the Boston News-Letter, first published in 1704. Its proprietor, John Campbell, deliberately left blank space in its pages so subscribers could annotate and otherwise append their ideas and "news" to the newspaper. These amendments weren't aimless jottings, either. Newspapers were routinely shared after purchase, and the notes readers added in the spaces and margins were designed to edify the friend or acquaintance the reader next forwarded his paper to. . . .

As newspapers evolved, readers found new ways to comment. . . . [L]ater subscribers in Boston paid a premium for wrappers "so they would have a generous writing space as they sent the paper along." In the 1800s, as pioneers moved West, the mailed newspaper became "a natural greeting card," as Leonard puts it, that allowed friends and family back home to know that the traveler had arrived at his destination. Friendships and courtships were advanced by the exchange of newspapers, much as friends and lovers trade URLs via e-mail today. By forwarding a newspaper—or a URL—the sender validates the information transferred. But usually, the information being transferred is dwarfed by the sender's expression that he is just thinking of the recipient.

So, the "comments" sections at the end of articles and blog posts, and "content sharing" through "social networking" sites, aren't just fads. They appeal to deep-seated human urges:

(1) to contribute actively to what you're reading, rather than letting elite content and thought be the last word in everything, and

(2) to transmit content to other people you know. If you read something you're excited about, you naturally want to share it with someone else instead of having a reading experience that's completely isolated and alone.

We've been doing these things for hundreds of years. It's just more efficient now.