In the technology world, this may be remembered as the month when Clubhouse started to matter. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg made appearances on the service. For a short time, Chinese-language discussions dealt with the Xinjiang issue in a frank and open manner, attracting wide public attention.

If you don’t already know, Clubhouse is a year-old social media service consisting of virtual "rooms” where people can talk to each other — by voice. That may not sound impressive, but many users swear by it, seeing it as a communications platform that could help restore peaceful discourse and civility rather than exacerbate tensions. I think of Clubhouse, which I joined last summer, as somewhere between talk radio and a dinner party.

Back in the 20th century, famed communications theorist Walter J. Ong suggested that oral cultures are more aggregative, more redundant, more conservative, and more openly questioning and dialogic. Given the social turmoil and polarization that the United States is going through, that all sounds pretty good.