Speaking of Neal Postman: I first got on the Internet in 1993. In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text based interface, whic

Speaking of Neal Postman: I first got on the Internet in 1993. In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text based interface, which encouraged long form writing, and line-by-line-dissection of long form writing, to a medium that is primarily pictorial, and increasingly video based, where close reading of long form stuff is discouraged by code and design. Postman himself declined even to look at the web in 1999, when I started reading his books, and he passed away in 2004. In 1999, I thought the Internet was part of the solution to the problem he was writing about. Today, the Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies. And the shift towards pictorial communication is rapidly approaching levels where it's a threat to civilization. Fark and Failblog are good amusements, but even the briefest look at 4chan will show you, we're in deep shit. The thing is, the Internet isn't just the Internet. Twitter can be criticized not for how well or how badly the company polices its users, but also in a medium-is-the-message way. Twitter is a cesspool of hate because the 140 character limit makes it useless for more than playground name calling. Facebook is part of the problem not just because of Facebook's policies but because it's an interface that pushes blogging into microblogging. We're going from a literate society to one that uses digital technology to get by on being sub-literate. This is double plus ungood.