Avoid isolation This is an increasingly murky notion to me re: the web. At any other time in history [1] sitting alone in your room reading something would ha

Avoid isolation This is an increasingly murky notion to me re: the web. At any other time in history [1] sitting alone in your room reading something would have been a solitary task without question. There was a social component insofar as you were interacting with an author, but since that's one-way communication (read-only medium) it was still clearly distinct from social activities. Fast forward to now when the thing your reading and writing is near-instantaneous updates to/from other reader-writers like you and this phenomenon is looking sufficiently different from traditional at-home reading as to defy most meaningful distinctions between introverted and extroverted activity. "But that's only text, you're not talking to people and seeing them like in real life." C'mon, I'm in an ambient Skype call with my girlfriend right now. We leave the thing on for hours at a time - yes, it's a way to cope with long-distance but also interesting because of how similar it really is to hanging out in the same room. "But you still can't feel or taste each other." No rebuttal... (and I'm still waiting on that Linux driver for my smell-o-vision). [1] Although it's so easy to think that your moment in history is unique. There are at least definite parallels between what's happening now with the web and past revolutions in publishing and communications, including the printing press, telephone, radio and television.