It's interesting that right now on HN there's another post about Facebook and how having one place for all of your conversations is harmful. I think the two top

It's interesting that right now on HN there's another post about Facebook and how having one place for all of your conversations is harmful. I think the two topics are related. It's not a matter of ignoring or running away from death, it's a matter of treating every piece of conversation that comes from my keyboard as all being the same. There's been no time in human history where we had such a "flat" model of interactivity. Even in small hunter-gatherer societies it's common for information to be withheld from some, shared with only a select few, etc. Man is a social animal, and these types of channel-selection and social posturing are a critical part of his healthy existence. We programmers have created the internet, and to us all of that social posturing stuff is just nonsense. Everything is just a bit on a disk somewhere. While that's true in a physical sense, it's tragically false in practice. The way we discuss philosophy, death, religion, politics, science, history, and the rest of it varies according to the crowd and the mood. It's not all just bits. But your point is spot on: we're still trying to figure out how to have conversations online. I think we are making a LOT of mistakes that are going to come back and bite us one day, one of which is thinking that democratic metaphors are applicable in all situations, but that day may be many decades off, after I'm dead myself, so aside from complaining about it I'm really not worried about it too much :)