jbml thln 54 older examples of this interference

ARE
KNOWN FROM
THE TELEPHONE, WHICH
CONVEYS A DISEMBODIED VOICE
WITHOUT ANY NONVERBAL CUES, AND EXPERIENCE AN ODD SENSATION
WHEN HEARING A FAMILIAR VOICE DISTORTED BY THE LOW FIDELITY OF TELEPHONE TRANSMISSION,
OR AN URGE TO SHOUT ON LONG DISTANCE CALLS, DESPITE THE REASONABLE AUDIO VOLUME
AND LOW NOISE LEVEL ON CONTEMPORARY PHONE LINES.

While many Internet Users
manage to push the intermediary machine into the background and focus on the human interaction, others apparently do not, and in the absence of immediate human clues and meta-language, abandon the self-restraint they may bring to their face-to-face interactions, leading to a verbal analog of road rage.

Besides the problem
of good web citizens allowing their manners to slip when no one is present to hint at what is aspected, the vision of an efficiently networked, direct democracy of immediate participation
is not universally shared.

To many,
the Internet embodies a frag-mented and alienated society, where thousands are whispering and no one is listening ~ the millions of personal blogs uploaded every day produce a mountain of undifferentiated factoids that very few actually read, & no one can possibly integrate.

The difficulty
of being heard in this information glut, together with the perceived anonymity of internet conversation emboldens some to vent anti-social thoughts and feelings they otherwise
keep private.

Against this background,
by asking how the participants in an Internet-Based demo-cracy can impose individual restraint or new legal structures that will preseve the collective interest, you raise
a serious concern.

On the other hand,
humans have shown an ability to disregard the collective interest and the humanity of others even in the presence of face-to-face communication, so while the Internet may conceivably evolve into a significant instrument of harm, at the present time the dangers it presents reflect those conventional problems.

As you {JB><ML} pointedly observe,
even to the extent that the Internet forms a democracy of expression, it cannot by itself provide any redistribution of political or economic power.

Despite the myth floating around cyberspace
for the past 25 years that envisions a major shift in economic power as information capital is shared & downloaded by every potential entrepreneur, much as music & video recordings are shared today, no evidence
for such a transition has been seen?

The dialectical struggle
between traditional conceptions of "intellectual property" and the technology of digital storage & reproduction is primarily about how "intellectuals" - and the businessmen that support them - should be compensated
for their work.

While the internet
has made the traditional distribution and unit pricing of books and recordings obsolete, information capital is fundamentally different because entrepreneurial secrets are not intended for wide-scale sharing and spdistribution
in the first place.

It is one thing
for the buyer of a recording to make reproduction generally available at zero cost, and quite another to openly share potentially valuable information, even if not bound
by nondisclosure agreements.