I've heard first-hand from engineers and designers at Facebook that their goal was "light-touch social" - comparatively superficial engagement that peters out if anyone gets too carried away. The platform choices are real, different and have far-reaching consequences for what's thinkable on each.

I like it, it's a very McLuhanesque reading.

But your point that LinkedIn is not Twitter is not Facebook is something finer-grained than McLuhan made, and those subtle (if at times, emergent) differences are immensely important.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFwV...

But we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the other revolutionary moments that lead us to this point. Inventing the future is some of the hardest work we can pursue - but with luck, our descendants will see it as inevitable, even disbelieving there could be a time before it. 7/7

That said, there is something different about the present moment. Spatial computing gives us an opportunity to live and express outside the laws of physics, to encode and discern meaning without the explicit interaction with physical surfaces. 6/

And it’s also essential to understand that what looks revolutionary on a 5-year timeline is really only contributing at the margins of a vast, millennia-long project of better pursuing the universal human goal of expression and comprehension. 5/

I’m enormously optimistic about the scope of technology to change human life - that’s why I do what I do. But it’s also essential to understand that *everything* we interact with is technology, including reading and writing. 4/

Most people are aware that printing is only 500 years old - but did you know that _page numbers_ only became popular about 50 years later? And punctuation - including the *the spaces between words* - only really emerged as a standard 500 years before that, around 1000 AD? 3/

Why look to the past, and why bother going so far? Because it’s the only way we can see change at a scale we need to imagine for the future. Here in the early 21st century, it can be easy to feel like the way we communicate is more or less fixed. Not so! 2/

Thank you sir, it's good to be here! When I heard Paul was helping kiwis off of the other place I was jumped at the opportunity.

There will be a little work pulling all the networks over but it looks like it'll be necessary, it's not going to get better :/