Interesting Snippets

Watts cited a science-fiction trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which Earth is a land of atomized steel caves, as opposed to Solaris, where all communication is virtual. On Earth, everyone whom everyone knows is known intimately, but they do not know anyone else. On Solaris, the connections are vast, but weak. It is almost too convenient to read that passage and, given the state of the news business in 2003, not think of newspapers as the equivalent of all those steel caves… The alternative to the steel caves, to the “clusters,” was the ephemeral network of Solaris. But where, in the here and now, did that network exist? How could it be harnessed? Peretti.. believed he had an answer: He called it the Bored At Work Network… How better to provide a momentary relief from the tedium than to disseminate something so engagingly simple that recipients would take a moment to forward it to friends