Editorial

Thumbing Our Way to a
Peer Information Model

Lenore Weiss
Fiction Editor

This holiday season, on my way to visiting a friend in Louisiana, I spent a lot of time sitting at various airports. There are no direct flights to Monroe, LA, so I found myself running up and down catching different flights at the Denver and Houston airports. On my way to the gate I passed an interesting spectacle: scads of young people in their 20s and early 30s leaning against backpacks and balancing on their laps a computer, a cell phone or game device. I watched as they stared straight into the oracle of their LCDs, thumbs waving and clicking as they conducted an electronic orchestra of iPhone applications, text messages, scrolling at lightening speed through email, destroying battleships, their thumbs doing most of the work.