The commoditization of knowledge

As we sit around the table at the academic center I'm at, most of us have our laptops open. We've taken to warning visitors about this. We're not being rude, we say, we're just engaging on multiple levels.

The truth is, of course, that sometimes we are being rude. During one particularly bad presentation recently, the back channel chat-plain old IRC-was especially biting. And funny. Even so, it served as a brake on rudeness as one of the participants wrote, "The examples he's using are the same old ones, and he's not even getting them straight. I don't want to attack him personally, but I ...