A lot of people will seek to make information prosthetics, but journalists need to think about amplification. – 1995
~~~
It’s hard to change information in books, but if we have everything online, then a somewhat untrustworthy group of people controlling the thing – which is what I think is what we have – gives us 1984. – 1995
~~~
I was thinking about ecological computing … Pretty soon we’re going to have to grow software, and we should start learning how to do that. We should have software that won’t break when something is wrong with it. As a friend of mine once said, if you try to make a Boeing 747 six inches longer, you have a problem; but a baby gets six inches longer 10 or more times during its life, and you never have to take it down for maintenance. – 1995
~~~
Another way to think of roadkill on the information highway will be the billions who will forget there are offramps to destinations other than Hollywood, Las Vegas, the local bingo parlor, or shiny beads from a shopping network. Not couch potatoes but mouse potatoes! It’s not the wonderful things they could do with new media, it’s what they will be convinced they should do. This is a new tragedy in the making. No democracy that is less than 10 percent literate can survive in the driving forces of society. Television should be the last mass communications medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon general’s warning! – 1995