Oh, I dunno. There’s another angle of this business of relating to some and not to others, bonding with birds of a feather, and fighting like cats and dogs, separating like oil and water.

The premise requires discussing centralized media in the form of (sometimes radio but mostly) television, a period which this article skips and ignores.

It goes like this: On TV, there were people you could watch and love and adore and idolize. They seemed wonderful and perfect because the persona you were exposed to was staged, rehearsed, pre-recorded. Call it the fish bowl effect.

The fish seem perfect as long as they stay on the other side of the glass. They can’t eat you if you don’t swim with them. Sharks and piranhas can be safely admired as long as you stay in your world, and they stay in theirs.

With the internet, this boundary is crossed, as soon as you adopt the perspective of the internet as telephone calls. If the internet is always a telephone call, the network is neutral, agnostic to the content of the call, and thus dialed with the expectation of confidential conversations and implicit privacy, then the fish bowl effect disappears.

But even the telephone call is an abstraction, because it ignored the one-to-many or many-to-many relationships. Telephone calls are mostly one on ones.

So compartmentalized concepts no longer serve us. All options are on the table now. None of this is democratizing. It’s not enough to just shrug and say “It’s the Internet” anymore. It’s not going to bring us together. Not by default. It’s hasn’t made things worse than the worst it’s ever been. It does make some things easier, even if sometimes things shouldn’t be easy at all.

Now that we have packet switched networks, there’s no One True Way for how to use them. Try to think of it as a system of moving sidewalks and escalators, but some of them drop into unmarked fish bowls.