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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.
A forecasting game is a kind of simulation, a kind of scenario, a kind of teleconference, a kind of artifact from the future - and more - that enlists the participants as 'first-person forecasters.'
The areas of the brain that have to do with speech are very connected with the same parallel processors that have to do with the kind of ballistic calculations you need to hit small game with a rock.
Journalists don't have audiences, they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.
Journalists don't have audiences - they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.
One of the things we know now that we didn't know then, is that revolutions are very painful to a lot of people. And that at the stage that we have evolved to now, a revolution would be extremely painful.
Technology no longer consists just of hardware or software or even services, but of communities. Increasingly, community is a part of technology, a driver of technology, and an emergent effect of technology.
Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.
Human beings were human beings anatomically for several hundred thousand years, wandering around, hunting and gathering. And then suddenly, at the same time they started painting in caves they started multiplying.
Technologies evolve in the strangest ways. Computers were created to calculate ballistics equations, and now we use them to create amusing illusions. Creating amusing illusions is a big business if you play it right.
There are these two strands, the Dionysian and the Appollonian, and in the same theater grew up from these folks who during the day were just ordinary citizens, and at night they would sneak off to the woods and party.
Kids automatically teach each other how to use technology, but they're not going to teach each other about the history of democracy, or the importance of taking their voices into the public sphere to create social change.
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.
There are performances in which the people who have the best muscle skills and musical history may be on the stage, but it's not - like a Dead show is not like a usual sit-down performance; the audience does participate.
Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create.
The more material there is, the more need there is for filters. You don't need a printing press anymore, but you do need people who know how to cultivate sources, double-check information and put the brand of legitimacy on it.
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.
Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it."
I think that most people really do need the sort of community you find in an office. Most people are always going to go into an office. If you are a member of a working group and you are not there physically, decisions are made without you.
What the Japanese are, are the Americans of the 21st century. Essentially what is objectionable about them is what was objectionable about Americans when we had the ball. However, they are committed in a way that American technology is not.
I think there are two aspects to smart environments. One is information embedded in places and things. The other is location awareness, so that devices we carry around know where we are. When you combine those two, you get a lot of possibilities.
In Japan, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well. So they have problem communicating with computers, so they really feel that what's missing from telephones and computer interfaces is this ability to move around in three-space.
The great power of the Internet is it allows people who don't know each other... to connect with people with shared interests. The shared interests might be that 'I have a kid with leukemia.' Or, 'I'm a Nazi.' It gives marginalized people more power.
Markets are as old as the crossroads. But capitalism, as we know it, is only a few hundred years old, enabled by cooperative arrangements and technologies, such as the joint-stock ownership company, shared liability insurance, double-entry bookkeeping.
Now of course like, you know fancy go to the opera and see drama and they regard them as high culture. And these, are really people for the most part who get uptighter. The idea that people you know might take their clothes off and dance in the street.
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.
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.
Schoolchildren are not taught how to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information online - surely there are ways to design web-browsers to help with this task and ways to teach young people how to use the powerful online tools available to them.
The first art in caves were really psychedelic experiences, and the reason that they were is because the tribal encyclopedia, the amount of information that people needed to know in order to move to a new way of life, suddenly increased over that period of time.
Communicating online goes back to the Defense Department's Arpanet which started in 1969. There was something called Usenet that started in 1980, and this gave people an opportunity to talk about things that people on these more official networks didn't talk about.
Active people to revitalize what is really the root of democracy: citizens communicating with each other. Democracy is not just about voting, it's about citizens talking with each other about the issues which concern them. We've lost a great deal of that in the age of the mass media.
People look at me, and I dress a little unusually and they think, 'Oh you must be from California.' Of course, people in California think, 'Oh you must be from from Mars,' so, you know, your next-door neighbour is not necessarily the person that you are going to make a connection with.
The Chinese government tried to keep a lid on the SARS crisis, but there were 160 million text messages in three days sent by Chinese citizens. These are early indications that it's going to be difficult for people who used to have control over the news to maintain that level of control.
You know back when there were light shows, there was this thing for people to sync into together. And the more people got synced into it, the more sync started happening. I guess it's just the size of the venue, and traveling around and so forth that it doesn't happen anymore. I don't know why.
Until fairly recently, Amish teachers would reprimand the student who raised his or her hand as being too individualistic. Calling attention to oneself, or being 'prideful,' is one of the cardinal Amish worries. Having your name or photo in the papers, even talking to the press, is almost a sin.
In Japanese organizations, before you have a meeting and you've got an idea that you want to get across, you go talk to everyone and list them. And then the meeting, you don't do it American style where everyone gets up and advocates and conflicts and decides, you get up and formalize agreements.
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.
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.
It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.
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 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.
We know where the television is - everything has to be a sound bite; everything has to be an image; ideas are okay as long as they don't take more than four or five seconds to explain; candidates and issues are commodities that are sold like cans of soup; entertainment is limited to what a few people believe the lowest common denominator is; and you can't talk back to it.
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.
Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads.
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.
Back in the really early days, the men went out hunting, the women stayed home with the kids, and would hold the kid in one arm against the heart, so that's the left, and with the right arm they would throw. And it turns out you cannot make that calculation in real time. You have to have an algorithm set up. So these brain mechanisms evolved in order to do that, and when they evolved, the thing is that where there is a useful capability it often adapts to places it wasn't evolved for.
Every big company has some little guy who is an enthusiast off in the corner working on technology. In Japan, it is integrated into their high-level strategy. They see it as a communication medium, because for them, just the words - and this is the problem that they have with Americans - just the words they say to you is not the complete message. Their facial expressions, their body language, there is a lot of context. Also, their written language doesn't translate to keyboards well.