To become intelligent and wise, you must master the art of conversation.

Today's social media has prevented the art of conversation from being passed on to young people. Young people today think that responding to the thoughts of another person means clicking a "Like" button or replying with an emoji. Today's social media does not facilitate a conversation between people who thereby become acquainted with each other and each other's thoughts on a subject.

In the early days, unlike today, there were many "chat rooms" on the Internet where you could have public conversations and become acquainted with people. In the early days of the Internet, people conversed, and got to know each other, using "bulletin board systems", which were computers that other computers could "dial in" to over telephone connections, using modems and "bbs software". As the Internet developed, people migrated their conversations from bbs's to "newsgroups". The next innovation, in 1984, was the concept of a "moderated" newsgroup. Ten years later, oo lawyers posted an advertisement on over 5,000 Usenet newsgroups. Usenet and its predecessors provided what today are called "chat rooms", which were places that made public conversations between a small number (e.g. 2 - 8) of participants, but viewed by an unlimited number of "lurkers", possible. In 1994, Justin Hall created the wo'th blog on his home page, "which contained 'essentially a review of HTML examples he came across from various online links,' according to HubSpot.". [See] In 2006, "microblogging was introduced with the launch of Twitter".. [See] The concepts of a (static) web site, a blog, and a microblogging web site, are all variations of the concept of a publication, and are functionally descendants of brochures, newspapers, magazines, and books. What most people experience as "social media" today is microblogging, not chat rooms.

Today's social media is designed to be addictively titillating and entertaining, not to inform or to bring people together to chat or experience social interaction. The name of the game is to maximize profits from advertising by developing an audience that is brainwashed into clicking on ads and purchasing the products offered in those ads.

Click the "Click here to join the conversation!" image at the top of this page to chat with other visitors about this page. On that page, you can also register as a student of Wo'O IdeaFarm. Paid (subscription) students can enter the Wo'O's Table room on [matrix] to chat with other registered students, to participate in guided classroom discussions, and to receive guidance while studying toward obtaining a Certificate of Mastery ("CM") of the material presented on this page. The classroom experience is designed to develop students' skill at the art of conversation while enabling them to master the material.