A brilliant essay by Emily Bell, on Microsoft’s real motives behind closing chat rooms: “Social connectivity through the internet is an awesome thing. It is beginning to undermine the vision of an ‘atomised’ society which so many sociologists and theorists, including Noam Chomsky, feared that television would create. Whereas TV, we were told, sapped the will to collective action, the internet refacilitates it. If television killed the art of conversation, the internet restores it.”
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