Sure, some news outlets have rid themselves of comment sections but it’s not likely because there are a lack of commenters. They more likely got rid of comment sections because they tended to descend into insulting chaos. For every blogger that quits, there’s another one out there to start a new blog. The blog world shifts around, much like a lot of other social media sites.

That Ebook sales are down isn’t of itself a meaningful statistic. How are regular book sales doing? If they’re also down 10%, then a drop in the purchase of Ebooks wouldn’t be very meaningful. Also, what difference does it make whether people read a physical book or an Ebook? I’m not sure Ebooks are evidence of technology dominating us.

I’m not sure I buy that media is dominating us. People’s interactions with each other shift over time. We’ve had plenty of monumental shifts over the past century or so. It used to take weeks to communicate with others via what we now call snail mail. A century and a half ago the telagraph made it easy and relatively quick to communicate around the country, a century ago the telephone revolutionized communication. Radio and then television also revolutionized communications and now we seem to have regular communications revolutions via the internet. There are certainly problems but I’m not sure it’s quite as bad as some people seem to think. It’s merely different.