A Broken Watch

Imagine if you and each of your friends wrote random things on index cards all day.  You then made copies of them and whenever you saw your friend or passed by your friend's desk, locker, mailbox, etc. you gave him a copy of the index cards you wrote on that day.  Each friend also gave you a copy of her cards.  After a few exchanges with a few friends, you had a stack of cards to go through, reading each individual card (and they wrote a lot of them).  And, since you wanted people to see your cards, and since trading cards became a social task in itself, you often started trading with just about anybody. Most of the messages were dumb and boring.  In fact, your friends knew that many other people would see these cards, so most were stripped of any kind of controversy or antagonism.  A number of the cards simply said "Here's something I like that I know many other people also like," and then other cards repeated the same thing and had things like, "Yeah!" ...