SOCIAL Do Not Sell Your Friends In spite of its many dehumanizing tendencies, digital media is still biased toward the social. In the ongoing coevolution between people and technologies, tools that connect us thrive—and tools that don’t connect us soon learn to. We must remember that the bias of digital media is toward contact with other people, not with their content or, worse, their cash. If we don’t, we risk robbing ourselves of the main gift digital technology has to offer us in return for our having created it. Almost immediately after the first computer networks were developed for Defense Department use, their system operators noticed something strange: the scientists who had accounts were spending more time and bandwidth talking about their personal research interests and favorite science fiction novels than official business. While the Internet—then Arpanet—was a technological success, it had become overwhelmed by social use.
