Inexpensive phones and pay-as-you go services are already spreading mobile phone technology to many parts of that world that never had a wired infrastructure.
Young voters are crucial. The trend over recent years has been for them to drift away. So anything that gets young voters interested in the electoral process not only has an immediate effect, but has an effect for years and years.
When designers replaced the command line interface with the graphical user interface, billions of people who are not programmers could make use of computer technology.
I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.
I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.
One thing we didn't know in 1996 is that it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a culture with online advertising.
It's too late by the way, with virtual reality. You can't put the genie back into the bottle.
Humans are language machines, computers are language machines.
It's more important to me to get an e-mail that says, 'I saw your page and it changed my life,' than how many hits the page got.
The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.
The industrial revolution took the father out of the home and put the kids in school. And then everyone had their own little scene.
Doesn't it seem ironic that people fear that we might become alienated by communicating with each other through computers, when we are already staring at these boxes in our living rooms for seven or eight hours a day, slack-jawed and saying nothing to anyone on either side and not talking back to it.
The two parts of technology that lower the threshold for activism and technology is the Internet and the mobile phone. Anyone who has a cause can now mobilize very quickly.
There are actual communication systems being built to enable eye surgeons to get inside the eye, and vascular surgeons to get inside the arteries. You could see a social reaction in which people would want to regulate this technology because they are threatened by it, and thereby cause a lot of harm. There are several scenarios that are happening at once. The other scenario is that the Japanese are going for this in a big way.
Telecommuting has its advantages and it has its limits. I think we need to find that sweet spot in between where it helps the environment, it helps people, but it doesn't alienate us and it doesn't cause our organizations to fall apart by centrifugal force.
If you depend on where the chestnuts are going to be, and where the deer are, you have to be attuned to the outside world.
Some digital natives are extraordinarily savvy.
I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.
Humans have lived for much, much longer than the approximately 10,000 years of settled agricultural civilization.
There is the global teenager hypothesis, that what happened in the '60s in America was that there was, the baby boom cohort grew up at the same time that television and popular music grew up, so that we had this carrier frequency that we all tuned into that gave us the feeling of a common culture, even though I was in Phoenix and someone was in Des Moines. That now we are getting the global cohort at the same time we have our first global communications. MTV is everywhere.
Flash mobbing may be a fad that passes away, or it may be an indicator of things to come.
Craigslist is about authenticity. Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.
I'm somebody who seems to stumble into things 10 or 20 years before the rest of the world does.
Pay attention to what you're paying attention to.
Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.
