Not to pick a fight with any post-structuralist critics or anything like that, but a certain frame of mind can only tolerate that kind of academic stuff for [so long].

The internet has many regrettable sides to it, but that's one thing that's always stood it in good stead with me: it's a writer's world. Your life online is mediated through words. You work, you socialize, you flirt, all by typing. I honestly feel there's a certain epistolary, Austenian grandness to the whole enterprise. No matter what words we use or how we tap out the letters, we're writing to each other now more than ever. Even if sometimes 'dam gerl' is all we have to say.

By forcing people to hide, intolerance creates its own cynical logic: when a large portion of a group goes unrecognized, it only makes marginalizing the whole easier. Visibility, on the other hand, creates acceptance.

Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters.

Although the thoughts expressed on Twitter may be foreshortened, there's no evidence here that they're diminished.

You can find readings of the Ballou letter on Youtube, and many of the comments are along the lines of "They just don't make them like that anymore." That's true. But what they, or rather we, are making offers a richness and a beauty of a different kind: a poetry not of lyrical phrases but of understanding. We are at the cusp of momentous change in the study of human communication and what it tries to foster: community and personal connection.

On the corporate side, the upshot of our data (the benefit to us) isn't all that interesting unless you're an economist. In theory, your data means ads are better targeted, which means less marketing spend is wasted, which means lower prices. At the very least, the data they sell means you get to use genuinely useful services like Facebook and Google without paying money for them.

I'm not going to pretend that a few minutes with Wikipedia can stand in for an understanding of a culture.

There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.

So much of what makes the Internet useful for communication - asynchrony, anonymity, escapism, a lack of central authority - also makes it frightening.