Ten years ago, before I had an internet connection or Amazon started turning a profit, I remember being at my Nan's and the TV was on. During the programme break there was an advert for Amazon.co.uk. As a 75 year-old she dismissed the internet as a fad. A strange attitude to have for someone born 18 months before the first demonstration of the very thing she's sitting in front of. I do love the smugness that comes from looking back on that.
The fogies are always banging on about the degeneracy of the internet, that it's a bastardised virtual library. It's actually a library and a community centre sharing the same building - you can read War and Peace on Project Gutenberg in one tab, and in another you can talk about mudkips. If you could see data moving around the internet it would be a stream of simultaneous chatter of varying quality, and quality is subjective.
Which leads me to Twitter. I'm very interested in microblogging as a medium for 'thought-dissemination'. As with semaphore, it's not the mode of communication for philosophy, but it does allow near stream-of-conscious output. I intend to use Twitter for this purpose. That might relieve the backlog of undeveloped drafts on this blog, which is 4 years old today.
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