Dave Rogers: Blind Faith:

As the stock market continues its free fall into the Clinton era, and the economic news grows worse and worse, we are cheered by the report of a study that indicates that “Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing.” Of course, irony being the fifth fundamental force of the universe, that little online headline was placed immediately across from this one: “Woman Who Posed as Boy Testifies in Case That Ended in Suicide of 13-Year-Old.”

John Scalzi: Technology Changes, People Not So Much:

Technology changes, social trends change, hairstyles change, but people – the actual human animals inside all that technology, sociology and tonsorial grooming — are the same as they have been for thousands of years. Grab a time machine, go back to ancient Egypt, and swap an infant there with an infant from today, and in twenty years you’ll likely find two people perfectly well integrated into their cultures because there is no difference in the human animal between now and then. Even within generations (which are an artificial construct in themselves, but never mind that now) there’s enough variation to drive you a little batty: The same generation that gave us the hippies went for Nixon in 1972, and that same generation gave us both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Go figure.

Jon Udell: Carl Hewitt on cloud computing, scalable semantics, and Wikipedia:

In one of the most striking moments in that talk, Carl says:

“What can I change? Just me. For anything else, I send a message, I say please, and I hope for the best.”

Then he laughs and adds:

“Does this sound like some circumstances you are familiar with?”

Having thought deeply, for 40 years, about the intersection of computation and human affairs, he has arrived at an elegant synthesis: The same organizational and communication patterns govern both realms.