Telephones emulated face-to-face communication, but they could not transmit the visible cues and physical gestures that allow face-to-face conversation to proceed smoothly, and this deficiency had to be overcome.

Today, as our email addresses circulate through the ether, we find in our electronic mailboxes not just surprise communications from long-lost acquaintances who have tracked us down using Gopher and other Web browsers, but also unwelcome communiqués from intruders offering get-rich-quick schemes, questionable deals, and shoddy merchandise. Even unsolicited religious messages are now circulating freely on Netnews groups.

He was convinced that no one would want the telephone because it was unable to provide any permanent record of a conversation.

while writing cannot replace many speech functions, it allows us to communicate in ways that speech does not. Writing lacks such tonal cues of the human voice as pitch and stress, not to mention the physical cues that accompany face to face communication, but it also permits new ways of bridging time and space.

Plato was one leading thinker who spoke out strongly against writing, fearing that it would weaken our memories. Pessimistic complaints about new literacy technologies, like those made by Plato, by Bill Henderson, and by Henderson’s idol, Henry David Thoreau, are balanced by inflated predictions of how technologies will change our lives for the better.

human beings are powerful pattern-recognizers. This body ofwork argues that humans don’t often think best when they attempt to reasonvia logic and general abstract principles detached from experience. Rather,they think best when they reason on the basis of patterns they have picked upthrough their actual experiences in the world, patterns that, over time, can be-come generalized but that are still rooted in specific areas of experience

Is it a wonder, then, that byhigh school, very often both good students and bad ones, rich ones and poorones, don’t much like school?

How are good video games designed to enhance getting them-selves learned—learned well and quickly so people can play and enjoy themeven when they are long and hard?

Indeed, the video-game in-dustry makes as much or more money each year than the film industry.

It broughtback home to me, forcefully, that learning is or should be both frustratingand life enhancing.

“Wouldn’t it be great if kidswere willing to put in this much time on task on such challenging material inschool and enjoy it so much?”

Similarly, in contexts like texting or chat, where the default way of breaking up utterances is with a new line or a new message, the period takes on connotations of seriousness and formality, a slight deepening of the voice at the end of a sentence. Thus, a period can reinforce a negative message (“that’s rough.”) but undermine a positive one (“that’s fine.”). The latter style reads to many younger people as passive-aggressive, a sign that the writer could have used a sincere exclamation mark (“that’s fine!”) but decided not to.