Amy Bruckman responds to Nick Carr

Nick, slight correction. "Manichean, presentist, and parochial" are used by Wellman & Gulia to describe punditry *about* the Net, ie what we're doing now. And the paper makes a compelling case for why those are NOT good ways of looking at what is happening online.

Manichean: Nope, not very useful to say it's either-or. The reality is more subtle.

Presentist: The reality of online interaction is an extension of evolution of modes of communication that have been changing for all eternity. People had major anxiety attacks about the invention of the telegraph. Thoreau wrote, "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....We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic... but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." Does all that sound familiar? These debates aren't new.

Parochial: Online discourse is richly connected to real life, and we can't understand it if we pretend that it exists in isolation. Look at the Blizzard Convention in Digital Nation. You can't understand WoW as a phenomenon without seeing the way players meet face to face and what role that plays.