Feb 092009
Bright young woman told me today that she worries about what the web is doing to conversation in her age group. Supposing people are sitting around and someone wonders what colour is the Peruvian flag. You could kick this around for a while, maybe guess, maybe design one for them, based on your ignorance of Peru, maybe stray off onto llamas, Shining Path guerillas, whatever; you could talk to one another. But instead (she tells me) someone looks it up on Wikipedia and there’s your answer, and there’s your conversation over and done. Pretty soon someone will mention something cool on YouTube and you all wind up standing around looking at the screen. And no-one’s going to remember the colour of the Peruvian flag.