Eventually, tightly knit digital communities became unable to cope with the deluge of new users, and it's said that onlinediscourse has never fully recovered.
But Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff and the other digital humanists are correct to say that onlinediscourse is best when we express ourselves in our own name.
His online tool is something can can give anyone with Web access a window onto the public discourse about this emergency, whether or not they use Twitter.
Political discourse is harder, as is any consensus action, because the collaborative promise of an online global village has morphed into an endless number of walled and locked enclaves of exclusionary ideologies.