A long time ago, but not too long ago, there was a village full of people. They lived together, ate together, worked together, and talked to each other. This went on for a while and things were good. Mostly at least—there were problems, naturally—but people worked on resolving them. They settled their disputes by listening to each other, by hearing each other out, by seeing eye to eye, by feeling heard, and by making every effort to understand where things went wrong. Most conflicts, they discovered, were mere misunderstandings.

One day an intrepid villager found a rock, and he realized that with a similar rock, he could talk across long distances. People started collecting these rocks and talking to each other through them. This allowed more people to talk to each other across bigger distances, and the village grew. People also talked more because they could do it from anywhere. It seemed marvelous, and it was magic.

Then another intrepid villager realized people could leave messages for each other without having to talk through the rocks—simply by using two rocks rather than one. The message would wait at the other end until someone would also use two rocks. Marvelous indeed. People started messaging each other, and people communicated even more.

Then some villagers discovered something else: if you held a particularly large stone—a stone with real mass to it—you could reach not just one person, but hundreds, perhaps thousands of people at once. Your voice, amplified through the stone, could travel to other far-flung villages, to places you'd never been, to people you'd never met. They called it mass communication.

Now anyone could broadcast and have a voice that reached thousands. Democracy of expression, some called it. A marketplace of ideas. And so everyone became an expresser, a transmitter into the stone-sphere.

The problem, which became apparent slowly and then all at once, was this: in some stone circles, nobody was listening anymore. Everyone was broadcasting. Conversations didn't go anywhere because they weren't conversations—they were competing monologues.

People became glued to their rocks, watching to see if anyone had noticed what they'd said, counting the responses. The stones, which had promised connection, now seemed to demand attention as their price. And attention, it turned out, was more finite than rocks.

This slowly led to more and more misunderstandings. Frustrating ones. People were talking past each other. Sometimes they tried to resolve them via voice call. But rarely face-to-face. And people got angry because they didn't understand each other. They didn't hear each other. They didn't see each other.

This went on for a while until things got so bad that people started throwing stones at each other. It was, perhaps, the last way to get anyone's attention or resolve an issue.

After the stone-throwing had gone on for a long long time, one villager—not particularly intrepid—walked over to another villager and screamed out loud, "Why are we doing this?" The other villager, surprised to hear filtered words, not relayed through mass communication, paused. "I don't actually remember," they admitted. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other's faces, which they realized they hadn't really looked at in quite some time. They started asking each other questions others nearby noticed and stopped to listen. Suddenly everyone dropped their rocks, and the villagers started talking to each other again.

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