Two tech comments...

quotes lifted from John Dyer's blog:

Author Gary Shteyngart writes eloquently about his technological transformation, “With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film. And, increasingly, irrevocably, I am a stranger to books, to the long-form text, to the pleasures of leaving myself and inhabiting the free-floating consciousness of another.”


Amazon's former Chief Scientist: “Why do people tweet? What is the driver of them spending time doing this? I think it’s because they think they have people giving them attention, and they do everything to play with that attention. The reason Twitter works so well is that they don’t have a feedback-loop, where people can realize just how little attention they’re getting. I’m not saying the system was set up that way deliberately, but it’s a very well setup system. People can fool themselves into believing that others are listening, which is not easy in real life. When you’re talking to other people on the street and nobody is listening, after a while you sort of have to stop talking. Not so on Twitter.”