Prof. Lionel Tiger may know his ground-living apes, but their monkey-see/monkey-do he speciously and simplistically applies to the Facebook phenomenon ("Zuckerberg: The World's Richest Primatologist," op-ed, Feb. 6). He invents an arrogant "Mr. Scold," who supposedly scouted the first phone line in New England. In point of fact, it was Henry David Thoreau who remarked in "Walden" (1854): "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
In 1917, Sigmund Freud wrote a paper praising the telegraph and telephone as wonderful innovations providing instant linkage to families and friends, promoting a beneficial social solidarity unknown to humanity before—and that while millions of men were killing each other in Europe.
Mr. Tiger sophistically counts Twittering communicators by the billion today and tomorrow, as though we are his bands of apes glancing at their leaders every 20 to 30 seconds. Thoreau thought of us as ineluctably solitary individuals: "The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest." There speaks our great American Diogenes. No "arrogant scold" he! Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Facebook won't answer, let alone change that fundamental fact.
Jascha Kessler
Santa Monica, Calif.
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