Democracy is not just voting for your leaders; it's really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues.
Democracy is not just voting for your leaders; it's really premised upon ordinary citizens understanding the issues.
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.
People's behavior will change with technology. I know very few young people who can't type out a text message on their phone with one thumb, for instance.
Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.
You can't pick up the telephone and say, 'Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.'
You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.
There is never going to be a substitute for face-to-face communication, but we have seen since the alphabet, to the telephone and now the Internet, that whenever people find a new way to communicate, they will flock to it.
Attention is the fundamental instrument we use for learning, thinking, communicating, deciding, yet neither parents nor schools spend any time helping young people learn how to manage information streams and control the ways they deploy their attention.
Of course, with agriculture came the first big civilizations, the first cities built of mud and brick, the first empires. And it was the administers of these empires who began hiring people to keep track of the wheat and sheep and wine that was owed and the taxes that was owed on them by making marks; marks on clay in that time.
The idea that your spouse or your parents don't know where you are at all times may be part of the past. Is that good or bad? Will that make for better marriages or worse marriages? I don't know.
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.
There's a direct relationship between how difficult it is to send a message and how strongly it is received.
Any disease support community is a place of deep bonds and empathy, and there are thousands if not tens of thousands of them.
A lot of people use collaborative technologies badly, then abandon them. They aren't 'plug-and-play.' The invisible part is the social skill necessary to use them.
I want to be very careful about judging and how much to generalize about the use of media being pathological. For some people, it's a temptation and a pathology; for others, it's a lifeline.