In 1932, about a decade after radio broadcasting began in Germany, a German playwright declared:
As for the radio’s object, I don’t think it can consist merely in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers.[*]
The “vast network of pipes” is now here. It’s call the Internet. May the suppliers prosper!
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[*] Bertolt Brecht, “Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat” in Blätter des Hessischen Landestheaters, Darmstadt, No. 16, July 1932, trans. in Brecht, Bertolt, and John Willett (1964), Brecht on theatre: the development of an aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang) p. 52.
The article discusses “how to bring him (the reader) into a relationship instead of isolating him”. Unfortunately, today, too many people (and too many web sites) only want to hear from readers who agree. The reaction to criticism is too often a reply that seeks to isolate or cut off the reader.