Benjamin Kunkel:

Never mind losing your virginity -- what is it like to live with someone? Proust seems to have recognized that domestication, as the technologists call it, was harder to describe than initiation.

Most internet users in wealthy countries now pay for web access at a flat monthly rate, and many popular mobile phone subscriptions allow you talk yourself hoarse without incurring surcharges. And if flat rates allow us to be always on, every day more "content" piles on with us.

Even now, I guard my solitude jealously enough that I have never owned a mobile phone—a fact that may end up ensuring me more solitude than I like. When I am forced to admit to a fresh acquaintance that I have no mobile number to offer, suspicion of eccentricity or poverty is the most generous response I receive; sometimes I get a look of frank alarm. But it seems I would rather raise a few eyebrows, curse the occasional payphone, and miss out on some parties than to spoil my necessary concentration and even boredom with phone calls I know I couldn't resist fielding or placing.

Lee Siegel:

1. Not everyone has something valuable to say.
2. Few people have anything original to say.
3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.
4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

Kunkel:

It would be nice to feel that the gratifying shallowness and diversity of digital life can be balanced with fidelity to great and challenging writing and art, that our chatting won't get in the way of our attempted masterpieces. There is no giving up the internet now.

No one is stopping you from stopping yourself. It's just that many users of digital communications technology can't stop. An inability to log off is hardly the most destructive habit you could acquire, but it seems unlikely there is any more widespread compulsion among the professional middle-class and their children than lingering online.

The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online—but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.

Matt Knox:

It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

On Walter Benjamin:

Long before Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

William Fleisch:

"Comeuppance" uses game theory and evolutionary psychology to explain why people find pleasure in both the happy and tragic lives of fictional charact... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]