piranha | (Reply)

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I'm bothered by the word "uniquely" in there. It makes the meaning of the statement ambiguous:

1)	"There is no other medium whose unsuitability to emotional content is precisely the same as that of the Internet". Probably true, but not particularly meaningful.
2)	"The Internet is unique among media in being unsuited to emotional content". I would argue that spam carving is very poor at handling emotional content, so the Internet cannot be unique in that regard.
3)	"The Internet is the worst medium for presenting emotional content". Did you actually look at that spam carving page?
4)	The word "unique" is misleading filler which should be ignored, giving us "The Internet is un-suited to emotional content". I find this the most likely interpretation, and I disagree with it. Since the Internet is capable of carrying many other media — prose, poetry, voice, music, images, movies, etc — to say that "the Internet" is unsuited to emotional content is, by implication, to say that books, films and photographs are unsuited to emotional content. Either that or that a book (or film or photograph) somehow loses its capacity for communicating emotion when it is distributed over the Internet. In either case there are so many counter-examples that the statement is obviously untrue. Or at least it should be.