I would like to amplify ​ the thorough responses of Mar, Nathan, and Con, and express my own thoughts on this particular paragraph in the Medium post: "To judge how people communicated in an online forum in 1974 through an extremely narrow gender-studies lens of 2017 not to mention a lens that is accustomed to looking at the world of today where billions of people spend many of their waking hours online, an online world where norms and customs about online behavior, including notions of what to expect from others online, have long been established and etched into unspoken law (but are still widely ignored), is to mischaracterize how things were in the historical period under examination, and ends up potentially misleading present-day people hoping to gain some insight into the history of PLATO." I encourage the author of the Medium post to invest the time in understanding "an extremely narrow gender-studies lens of 2017" beyond a Wikipedia page or single SAGE handbook. Both the breadth and pre-1970s legacies of gender studies might become more readily apparent. Regards, Meryl Alper -- *Meryl Alper* Assistant Professor Department of Communication Studies Northeastern University Holmes 217 m.alper@northeastern.edu merylalper.com Author, *Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality* (MIT Press <https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/giving-voice>, Amazon <https://www.amazon.com/Giving-Voice-Communication-Disability-Inequality/dp/0262533979/> )