But Does Anyone Really Care?
All the geniuses with computers love to tell you you can talk to people all over the world if you’re on line. Who wants to? You want to talk to people all over the world? People don’t talk to the guy next door. . . . People are standing in an elevator — do you talk to anybody? A guy calls you up and he’s got the wrong number — do you start a conversation? Do you ever say, “Sure glad you got the wrong number!” You’re gonna holler, “You got the wrong number!” And God forbid he calls you again: you think he’s a stalker, you call the police.
Reminds me of a quote from Thoreau’s Walden that I read in Amusing Ourselves to Death
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
I’ll leave these without comment.