LowellDeeds

The registry of deeds website wasn't the only computer operation that experienced problems last week. Amazon.com, the enormous online bookseller, embarrassed many people when a computer glitch replaced the anonymous names used by those who wrote book reviews (such as "a reader from Concord") with their real names. Turns out a number of authors had written glowing reviews of their own books, urging readers to buy immediately. Many negative reviews, it seems, are the work of rival authors seeking to trash the competition. This story is a good reminder that the apparent intimacy of email as a means of communication - it's just you and your computer - is disarmingly deceptive. Far from being intimate, email always retains the potential to be infinite, as in the number of people who may end up reading it.