It's fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people as well.
Engineering serendipity is this idea that we can help people come across unexpected but helpful connections at a better than random rate. And in some ways it's based on trying to reassess this notion of serendipitous as lucky - to think of serendipitous as smart.
The Internet challenges traditional ways of distributing and processing information and so encourages new standards and behavior.
Creativity is an import-export business.
A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine.
The term 'cyberutopian' tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naively overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies.
There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.
Re-tweeting is a pretty common practice on Twitter, but on an average day, we see maybe one out of 20 posts is a re-tweet.
The benefits and consequences of globalization have a great deal to do with whether we're intelligent and thoughtful about how we approach globalization, or whether we're blindly accepting... or blindly resistant.
People want to be thought of as something other than a source of money. They want to be thought of as creative, thinking people.
You can make the case that slacktivism is important because it makes people feel affiliated to a movement and be part of it, and talk about it.
A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.
When you look at the 'New York Times,' you look at other elite media, what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations and the nations we've invaded.
Curators are great, but they're inherently biased. Curators are always making an editorial decision. Those biases have really big implications.
It's become relatively commonplace to find corners of Africa that have good cell coverage but no electrical power.
Teenagers try to hide what's really going on in their communication online.
Reading the text of my blog itself is not really the interesting part. The exciting part is how the Internet allows me to be the eyes and ears for the people sending me postings from Africa.
The U.S. media have done a shameful job of reporting on the Arab world.
I can imagine Iceland becoming a good place to run a controversial Web site. But... Iceland may find itself forced to defend controversial speech.
The Internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces. There's some interface between them, but there's a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.
