Love this analogy and contraposition:

Jonathan Franzen is wrong: the digital age is making us smarter | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer: “If Dickens were alive today, guess who’d be blogging, offering the occasional tweet, setting up literary websites, digging out some of his old work and repackaging it in ebooks. Dickens loathed many of his publishers, whom he regarded as lazy, thieving parasites, and he would have been thrilled by the opportunities we have of unmediated connection between writer and reader.”

Indeed Dickens would have loved web2.0 as I imagine Poe and quite a few other less-than-convential authors would have made use of these mediums.

It is highly disingenuous of us to suggest that mediums outweigh the messages…