While I appreciate Amazon’s search engine as an interface to a commercial site, I’m also skeptical that it would function well as a research library’s catalog. Furthermore, for certain kinds of commercial searching, Amazon is utterly painful. I was recently shopping for a flash memory card for a digital camera. Indeed, I made the purchase through Amazon, but only after I spent a good deal of time exploring other sites—and talking to friends—to obtain the information I needed to make the choice. On Amazon, products often appear as barely distinguishable widgets.

Well, yes, I was using “RSS” metonymically to refer to the broader phenomenon of folks seeking feeds, installing readers (hence “applications”) or setting up web accounts, and establishing alerts to particular sources of information or you-name-it. I think there is a social component to it, inasmuch as one’s choice of “golden nuggets”—sources for keeping alert to news, hobbies, cultural events, etc.—is akin to one’s choice of friends on whom one relies. But then there’s also a social component to newspapers. Why do we forget such a characteristic? Or, if we were never really aware of it, why now that we have learned the value of a social network to the creation, packaging, and delivery of information, do we neglect to recognize how that some of that value all along resided in the old medium?

Your grandmother’s experience with Outlook Express perhaps supports my point. I’m not arguing that we need to have read all of the pertinent RFCs in order to use the Internet fruitfully. Users need to “understand a technology’s limitations,” at a level that at least disabuses them of the notions that “everything is on the web” or “Google will help you locate anything.” Certainly, your grandmother needs to know about spam, viruses, and malware, technical functions of the e-mail system that limit its utility.

As for the final paragraph—and I’m really pleased that you got a kick out of it—I would say that I do know technologists who understand the parameters of digital technologies, but I’m also aware of some who seem a bit too sanguine about technology’s promise. Furthermore, I think some healthy skeptics can be found among the Humanities. Take, for example, Richard Lanham, whose new book, “The Economics of Attention,” is in fact very enthusiastic about technology, but who balances that enthusiasm by urging us to recognize the value of very old modes of thought—the lessons of classical and Renaissance rhetoric, Lanham’s expertise as an English professor—to our current situation.

Thanks again for this forum.