I’ve been reading The Media Lab: Inventing the Future At MIT recently. It was written in 1988 by Stewart Brand who created the Whole Earth Catalog and who has said some pretty observant and insightful things about technologies and the way that they are used.
This observation, from The Media Lab, may not be one of them: "The most surprising and consistent quality in e-mail communities is the human warmth they develop."
Maybe things were better before the invention of top posting.
That warmth can be properly dealt with by putting on an asbestos suit before engaging in email conversations