Lauren van Holten

It didn’t just start the conversation, it’s continuing the conversation,” he said. “This is not just ‘15 seconds of fame, go on to the next story.’ This story is going to be 24/7 [for a while]. There’s a reason why people call this ‘old media.’ That’s because it took 500 years to build up this tradition. You don’t just throw the white flag and say, ‘OK, everything is digital now.’

Sony’s gravest mistake was that it failed to ride some of the biggest waves of technological innovation in recent decades: digitalization, a shift toward software and the importance of the Internet.

Social media is simply an overlay that must be applied to existing business functions including marketing, customer care, e-commerce, search, HR, internal systems, legal, etc.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs glom on to one idea en masse, often resulting in a run of overlapping, if not entirely duplicative, incarnations of one core concept. It happened with location-based platforms, group messaging apps, group buying services, and daily deals. The latest such insta-trend is in the apparent reinvention of social bookmarking sites, as a slew of new players have flooded the interwebs, each with its own take on improving what Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us set out to do several years ago (and still do, to some degree).

Everyone keeps asking ‘Is print dead?’ It’s been the question of the moment for last five years,” Ms. Dean said. “Print is not dead. But it has to evolve. The challenge for a magazine is to create real physical experience for their audience.

With the rise of popular fiction appearing on ereaders, I think the paperback will be the first to go and all that will be left is the “curio” hardback. Then I look forward to a half decade of the publishing industry scrambling to stem piracy and flail wildly at consumers, then hardware manufacturers, then finally settle into the long-fall doldrums the music industry is now facing.

He and Ms. Landemore suggest that reasoned discussion works best in smaller, cooperative environments rather than in America’s high-decibel adversarial system, in which partisans seek to score political advantage rather than arrive at consensus. Because “individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation,” Mr. Mercier and Ms. Landemore, as a practical matter, endorse the theory of deliberative democracy, an approach that arose in the 1980s, which envisions cooperative town-hall-style deliberations. Championed by the philosophers John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, this sort of collaborative forum can overcome the tendency of groups to polarize at the extremes and deadlock, Ms. Landemore and Mr. Mercier said.

I’m with the objectors, but reasonable people are disagreeing. Which is why I went to Jezebel in the first place, and why I go there and to blogs like it when stories about gender and sexuality break. Critical, thoughtful writing about those subjects aren’t something we do much of, or at least enough of, in the mainstream press.