…from the Washington Post, Google will now apparently gift wrap their browser Chrome for you, so that you can have a Christmas present from Google…
…while it is perhaps a temptation to read too much into this, it got me thinking about the Internet and lonely people. Years ago, back in the days of when Gopher was the Internet, I heard a story about two tech savvy librarians who took a senior member of the faculty to a computer terminal to show him the wonder known as the Internet. He sat down and started surfing one Gopher site after another, apparently fascinated. Some time the two beaming librarians returned to this gentlemen, and when he looked up from the screen he said, “I had no idea so many people were so lonely.” There is a body of literature about the Internet and personality types and alienation and technology and all that, accessible through subject headings like, say, Internet–Social Aspects. Thoughts on lonely people and browsing the web on a rainy December day…