[folksinger]

You make a good point about Walkmans and newspapers... As McLuhan would point out, the Narcissus trance is present in all media technologies! That doesn't meet we should give in to the alluring trance of the Siren.

It is true that newspapermen created the Spanish-American war out of thin air as well, but we learned our lessons about the unethical use of mass print media. Irony of ironies in the name Pulitzer Prize!

I just want to make sure we're not blind to the downsides of this new "liberating" technology. It has had plenty of defenders and has swept up billions of people in its grasp.

Perhaps feeling depressed by staged photos of a friend on vacation posted to Facebook is one thing but threats of nuclear war on Twitter are a much more serious matter!