One of those days when I am looking back over 20 years of “Web” and grieving the loss of the sense of aliveness for dialogue. Today, we get “Likes”. I don’t begrudge them at all when I get them, but sometimes they serve to accentuate how we rarely go beyond those and into conversation. I REALLY thought that over a 20 year time span, that we would have expanded conversations into and through all advances in technology. Now we have video chat, Facebook, Blogs, Google Hangout, Smartphones, etc. But we spend our time on those devices and services exchanging safe , vanilla interests, non-threatening surface things. On a day like today, I am disturbed by the expansion of the everyday distances we keep from one another into the supposed “opportune” wide-embrace of the Social Web. But I am beginning to feel that it has become drowned out by what Neil Postman describes as “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (to the media of that day— and perhaps now, into our day and our media).