imposing order through habits of practice and thought.

And that is really the point: the only way we can prevent a ‘conversation’ with more than four people breaking up into several smaller conversations is by turning it into a lecture with socially agreed rules that oblige the rest of us to maintain a respectful silence and not interrupt the speaker.

by pulling millions of people into the potential audience for every post or tweet or photo, these companies force everyone to treat every conversation as a potential performance to millions of total strangers.

But conversations  should not  be performances, unless they are explicitly staged as such. Conversations should not be battleground