Communication Ethics book part for Time. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Only in the modern era, through live television and radio, telephones, and the Internet have we achieved effectively instantaneous communication over long distance. A lot of communication is still not instantaneous. Thus, a single "connection" may actually have a long life. When one reads the Code of Hammurabi, who ruled in 1795-1750BC, one is reading a work across a connection spanning nearly four thousand years. It can be instructive to consider the chain of responsibility for the work: The original author, the transcriptionist, the carver, the archaeologist, the translator, the web site host... note that I am not on it, I'm just pointing at the work and have no control over it.

This is one of the reasons I define connections as a unidirectional flow, rather then the more intuitive (under some circumstances) bi-directional flow. "Connections", and more specifically, the "messages" quite frequently outlast their senders. Modelling that as bi-directional is the only way this makes sense.