When I was a girl, we sent our emails on long sheets, made from trees - calld it "paper"!

While I had my issues with certain aspects of Benkler's argument (frequent use of vagaries like "anyone can publish" or "attractive public sphere"), It nevertheless made me nostalgic (in advance) for disappearing forms of mass media.

In sections 13 and 14, he describes blogs and wikis as "weighted" - meaning they vary in the degree of moderation exercised by the person in charge. I wished at this point that I could remind Benkler that the idea of a moderated forum for comments on a media source is not entirely new. Letters to the editor, in fact, offered a similar model, although as Benkler points out later, the criteria for endowment with this kind of editorial power is different on the internet. In a sense, though, I think our perception of newspapers as invariably heavily moderated is skewed by a general scholarly overepmhasis on metropolitan, bourgeois media. Small town and working class media emphasize different degrees of control and offer an outlet for different kinds of commentary, for a variety of small or large audiences, much like blogs and wikis. Granted, you didn't have the totally unmoderated end of the spectrum in, say, newspapers, but that's pretty rare on blogs and wikis anyway. All I'm really trying to say is that this kind of claim often perpetuates the myth that modes of communication on the internet are often seen as wildly different from their predecessors, and we might do well to pay attention to residual practices once in a while too.

This led me to wonder how long the residual form will stick around - who writes letters to newspaper editors now? Newspapers and letter-writing alike seem to me like nearly extinct phenomena. But I'm not fully convinced that the technology was the driving force behind this shift. It seems that generations x and y had been accused of carrying an overwhelming sense of apathy even before we lost interest in writing angry letters. Perhaps the technology arose out of our desire for instant gratification, as well as our desire to dispel these suspicions of apathy without having to do a lot of work.