This quote from legendary American journalist Edward R. Murrow has been bouncing around my head the past few days:
The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.
I find this a useful frame for considering the debate raging in Second Life about the opportunities and pitfalls of voice chat, and for reading through some of the 100+ metaverse open source project ideas that Jerry Paffendorf and some other virtual world big thinkers have come up with. In the end, the challenge is still largely "what to say and how to say it."
[Quote taken from J. LeRoy's blog in his post on "Top 5 Illusions of Social Media."]
