'“You still feel good when everyone wishes you happy birthday on Facebook even though you know they were prompted to do it.” Dr. Rosen said the average person was not addicted to Facebook. Instead, he characterized the relationship as a compulsion. “Addictions are about finding pleasure,” he said. “Compulsions are born from anxiety, and Facebook is psychologically important. It allows us to project on the world, in a way that we’ve never been able to before, who we are and what we want to say about ourselves.” As a result, he said, Facebook “drives our behavior online.” He added: “We are always checking to see if anyone posted on our wall, if they liked a photo, responded to an update. For those who use it, they are feeling more of a need to look at it and check in and reduce the anxiety of feeling like they are missing out on something.”'

'In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors: “...Work alone...” -- Solitude can even help us learn. According to research on expert performance by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, the best way to master a field is to work on the task that’s most demanding for you personally. And often the best way to do this is alone. Only then, Mr. Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class — you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” ...decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.” The one important exception to this dismal record is electronic brainstorming, where large groups outperform individuals; and the larger the group the better. The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.'

"The most destructive thing that we've allowed to have an expectation of each other is that we will instantly respond to each other ... and almost without thinking." "If you need to be constantly responding, you can only answer in little bits that really show no thought." -- "The kid comes out of the school, is desperately trying to make eye contact with the parent, and the parent is sitting there glued to the phone..." "This generation has grown up seeing technology as the competition. I don't think they're going to raise their children this way."

"Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas."

'Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go.' -- Take four red capsules. In 10 minutes, take two more.

'“A ‘place’ used to constitute a physical place and the people within it. What is a place if those present have their attention on the absent?” -- Turkle also points out that the language used in email and texts tends to be less carefully constructed because it is understood to be garbage bound – that is, it is intended to be read once and then deleted. Reading this, I see an even greater value to every academic essay and oral presentation we assign to our students. Very few arenas of digital communication demand careful thought, planning, and sustained argument. Giving students the opportunity to build these seemingly ‘old fashioned’ skills may be one of the most valuable things we have to offer them.'

'"I'm dropping off the radar for a while," wrote Allen, 36, who lives in a two-story house with running water, electricity, regular garbage pickup, wireless Internet access, and high-definition satellite television service. "If you need something, text me." Allen has not been heard from since earlier this afternoon, when he confirmed via Twitter that he was "maintaining radio silence" and then checked in to his local coffee shop on Foursquare.'

'The goal of this series (other than to simply entertain) is to raise awareness about the abundance of various tangled messes in the world and to establish the humanitarian fund dedicated to eradicating this blight from the face of the Earth entirely.'

'We'd rather text than talk. It makes us feel more in control. We use digital technology to try to be efficient in our intimacies and it leaves us diminished. A mother explains that she cannot resist the "lure of the little red light" telling her that she has a new message on her BlackBerry, even when she is driving on the highway with her children in the car. We are vulnerable to the seduction of always-on/always-on-us connection. The unread message, that red light, has come to stand for our feelings of hope. That someone wants us, that something new is coming into our lives. -- Much of the reaction to Alone Together has been critical, as though I have told the world to "unplug" ... I have been portrayed as an anti-technology crusader. This rhetoric points to a serious problem.' -- Addiction.

'The technology has power because it addresses psychological vulnerabilities that many of us have. We want connection, but many of us fear the consequences of connection. True intimacy can be very scary. ...this is particularly true of the narcissists: "In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.” This can set into motion a vicious cycle. As Sherry points out: "...if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants – it demands – immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands but creates a self that prefers simulation. Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.'

'I’m going to invite you into my shower for a few minutes. Sorry about that, but it’s the only place I can really think these days. I’m almost never alone with my thoughts anymore. I bring my social network, ego searching, incoming news and various means of communication with me wherever I go. I pull out the phone at stop lights, when I’m waiting for groceries to be be bagged, in between steps at the ATM, in bathrooms, on walks with my son, waiting in school drive-thru lines, everywhere. And it’s not just when I’m out. When is the last time you did something creative on your computer — written a blog post or a letter, worked in Photoshop, or even read a long article — without allowing yourself to be interrupted by the realtime internet?'

'...smart, passive checkins. More advanced systems could also guard against “cheating” because they would keep you honest: Your phone is like your IP address. If we can find smart ways to stop fictional checkins, this in turn will make rewards and prizes for loyalty more relevant. The next step, once you have approved the checkin, would be whether you would push this information to Facebook (Facebook) and/or Twitter (Twitter). The option would of course exist to be easily “OffGrid,” if you don’t want to be found. This feature would also make a lot of sense for “swarming.” A swarm is a proactive thing, one of the cornerstones of social networking and a real payoff for geosocial. If a predictive system was implemented, the service could then know when to expect a swarm and how many people would likely be there — data that would be extremely valuable for a variety of businesses. What we want is a passive geosocial experience, and we don’t care who brings it to us.'

'Meet Caterina Fake, the creative spark behind Hunch. Her big idea? Develop a web service that knows what you want before you even want it. Get people talking about themselves — their opinions, tastes, beliefs, idiosyncrasies. Then, once they have shared enough information, mine that data for correlations that provide precisely tailored recommendations for each user. It is a quietly radical premise, implying that our tastes are defined not only by what we buy or what we’ve liked in the past but by who we are as people. There’s only so much it can learn from 1 million users. So Hunch is scouring the Web for information, combing the databases of social sites like Facebook and Twitter for anything that’s publicly available — opinions and allegiances, likes and dislikes, followers and friend requests.' -- Why so curious?

'Last week I showed my dental hygienist who else was checked in to the dentist's office on Foursquare at the same time I was, and her first reaction was concern about HIPAA (the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which regulates the security and privacy of health-related data). She decided no one could stop the patients themselves from exposing their own location; she just couldn't confirm to me whether or not she actually knew who those people were.'

'SuperMe is a web game which helps you to be better at life. It's about resilience: how to feel good when life chucks you lemons. How to be better at thinking positively. How to cope with, and learn to love, failure. By playing SuperMe you'll learn how to be more resilient in real life, and by playing every piece of content you'll score points. Points! Everyone wants those. There are 500 experience points to be collected in Wisdom, Ability, Influence and Connection. The more experience you collect the better you are, and the higher you'll level up.' -- What these 'games' really need is an exit achievement called, 'DONE NOW. THANKS FOR THE HELP, EVERYONE. I'M OFF!' where you delete the game along with your points, badges and public profile and take your skills/achievements into real life where there's no easy feedback or pats on the head. Maybe there already is such an achievement. Perhaps it couldn't ever be 'built-in'.

'FB: "working with some partner Web sites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience" at those sites. The potential downside seems obvious. You'll see that some random site knows who your Facebook friends are and fret about other once-private information Facebook might be leaking. But what will you be able to do when so much of your life is tied up there? As Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an e-mail Thursday: "There is a sense of the 'investment' in Facebook being so great that one is beholden to it. This is not empowering."'

'#Stage Four: Greed: Because Foursquare is meant to be a game, of sorts, there are winners (people who check in all over the place) and losers (people who don't). And as soon as you figure this out--generally after a week of just-for-fun use--the novelty wears off, and the competition kicks in. -- #Stage Five: Apathy: You've scored at least one week atop the Leaderboard. But since the charts reset every week, and you don't get as many points for re-visiting the same places, your moment of glory is fleeting. ...you kind of stop caring. What initially excited you about Foursquare--apart from being able to keep tabs on people you know, which you still may want to do--was getting "rewards" for living your everyday life. Once you have to start working for them (spending more money, traveling greater distances), you realize they're not actually worth it. -- That, or you start appreciating Foursquare for what it really is: a simple(r) way to stalk your friends.'

'This brave new inter-networked, socially-mediated, post-industrial, cybernetically-interwoven world is an integrated web of Pavlovian stimulus and response and I'm barking at the bell. Turns out, this isn't a Skinner Box. No, "box" is too confining for this metaphor. This is a fully networked, digitally rendered, voluntarily joined Skinner Borg. It doesn't embed itself in us, we embed ourselves in it. It's Clockwork Orange, self served. The singularity is here, and it's us... also it's dumb, snarky, and in love with itself. Age of spiritual machines? Whatever. Show me spiritual people.'

Thoreau's formulation of a fully developed life: Live deliberately; live in your own life; live with no sense of resignation. '... on all of those dimensions, I feel that we're taking away from ourselves the things that Thoreau thought were so essential to discovering an identity. We're not deliberate; we're bombarded. We have no stillness; we have resignation -- There is a wonderful Freudian formulation, which is that loneliness is failed solitude. In many ways, we are forgetting the intellectual and emotional value of solitude. You're not lonely in solitude. You're only lonely if you forget how to use solitude to replenish yourself and to learn. And you don't want a generation that experiences solitude as loneliness. And that is something to be concerned about, because if kids feel that they need to be connected in order to be themselves, that's quite unhealthy. They'll always feel lonely, because the connections that they're forming are not going to give them what they seek.'

'Carles attempts an escape from postmodernity by announcing a retreat from his online persona. As with Carles's earlier attempts at retirement and "digital suicide", Carles expresses an ultimately unfulfilled intention of retiring from blogging to expose how such intentions are in danger of becoming mere fantasies. It is no accident that the intention is presented as a question in the title of the first post linked above. The digital self is no longer autonomous, if it ever was autonomous in the first place. Our intentions are now subject to real-time referenda in the digital agora formed by mandatory social networking. We can now only at best wish to remove ourselves from the digitization and social mediatization of our lives. We can only dream of not broadcasting the quotidian details of our lives...'

"It's just part of society that we're multitasking all the time. We can't stop to think, and if we have to stop and consider something, we get frustrated." -- "Look at language. People are writing the way that they text. Anything complex that takes several paragraphs to develop is information overload at this point." -- "I think of it as regressive. I don't think of it as progressive. It's becoming so normalized in our culture, it becomes hard to catch while it's happening."

'The 10- and 12-year-old girls updated a Facebook status to say they were lost in a drain on Honeypot Road at Hackham in Adelaide’s southern suburbs on Sunday night. Glenn Benham from the MFS says it was fortunate a young friend was online at the time and was able to call for help for them. “It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls,” he said. “If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway.”' -- IM. TAKING. MY. LAST. BREATH. LOL

'One of the best utilities is Twitcaps, developed by Jonathan Griggs, who found himself using his own service in a way he never could have predicted after a tornado appeared nearby. “When we were having tornado warnings in Denver and the warning sirens were going off near my house, my girlfriend and I grabbed the laptop and made way for the basement,” said Griggs in an e-mail. “Once there, I looked up ‘Denver tornado’ on Twitcaps and found images of the funnel cloud moving northeast from Coors field — a good ways to the east of my house. This was far more information than was available from local news sources at the time, and was enough to set us at ease that we were in no immediate danger.”' -- It's all going a bit Archigram: The house could have monitored this and simply got up and walked away to safety.

'#3. Location-Based Groups: Whenever I’m stuck in traffic these days, I do a quick search on Twitter to figure out why. It would be nice to be automatically “subscribed” to my location to find out what’s going on.'

'This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities. -- “They used to have blankies; now they have phones, which even have their own umbilical cord right to the charger,” said Liz Perle, a mother in San Francisco who laments the early-morning technology immersion of her two teenage children. “If their beds were far from the power outlets, they would probably sleep on the floor.”'

'I’m starting to think that Internet romances, including Mark Sanford’s, are not romances between people at all. They’re affairs with the Internet. Watch people who are newly in love, especially any kind of love that requires that the participants keep stealthy and apart, and they’re all over their iPhones and Palm Pres. It’s P.D.A. with P.D.A.’s. Romance seems to have become an online multiplayer fantasy-adventure game, no less thrilling than World of Warcraft, and open to all ages. Apparently you’re never too old to relish using special screen names to send cryptic messages on secret decoder devices.' -- 'The connection to communications technology — the connection to connection — has become part of what makes us human. In the idiom of those who are swooningly in love, it makes us “feel alive.” When we’re denied the connection to connection, it’s no wonder we lust for it.' -- Love, temes xXx

'...powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.” We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.' -- Last page: On the pharma-co-logic of the casino-capitalism model. Grim.

'The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person's skin, so that authorities could track him easily. Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he'd become a public threat. The inventor said the chip could be used to track terrorists, criminals, fugitives, illegal immigrants, political dissidents, domestic servants and foreigners overstaying their visas.' -- WTF?WTF?WTF?

'Constant connection makes us chronically impatient. We come to expect everything to happen at the touch of a button – and get angry when it doesn't. As the actress Carrie Fisher once quipped, these days "even instant gratification takes too long." The other day, my neighbour, a multitasking marketing executive, lost her BlackBerry; or thought she did. It turned out that her five year old daughter had hidden it. "I thought it would get you to listen to me when I talk," explained the little girl. Overdosing on mobile communication can also mess up the relationship we have with ourselves. Human beings need moments of silence and solitude: to rest and recharge, to think deeply and creatively, to look inside and confront the big questions, 'Who am I? How do I fit into the world? What is the meaning of life?'. That isn't likely to happen when your mind is constantly wondering if you have new email or if it's time for a fresh tweet.' -- Interesting comment on fear of uncertainty (untether)

Sherry Turkle: '“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be. Texting hits directly at both those jobs.” Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind. “If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”'

"On one level, people have understood the power and importance of silence for a long time. It's why we go to the woods, or the ocean, or up on mountainsides to renew ourselves. And why we take up meditation, or spend time in quiet cathedrals. But even the most majestic mountainside loses a large piece of its power to inspire if it has to compete with a cell phone, text reply, or other efforts to stay connected elsewhere at the same time. Or even to record the moment, instead of simply being in it. We also have an ingrained habit of constant connection that makes disconnecting more difficult. And potentially more painful. Where there's a will there's a way, of course. Which is what makes me suspect that at least part of the constant connectivity movement and technology stems from an inherent desire, within many of us, to have all that distraction. We are not, as a species, hard-wired for solitude. We're social animals, made to exist in tribes and packs. And yet ..."

"I have this sense that experiences need to be shared in a much more mediated way to register to myself as having happened. ...since online sharing has become a way of translating my own experiences to myself, without that process readily available to me, I felt dulled at times, alienated from myself to a degree. All of this is to say that I think that the internet has suddenly brought us a much denser experience of interpersonal relationships and sociality that forces us to reshape the way we think of ourselves, as being potentially social at basically all times. We are perpetually present everywhere, with a ubiquity wireless connectivity supplies. The result of this thick intimacy, this perpetual sociality, is that we may have much more difficulty achieving harmony with the natural world, where presence is momentary and fragile, and sociality is limited to the distance our voices can travel." -- Data or it didn't happen.

'Robert Bornstein talks about "dual dependency": the desire to have portable technologies nearby all the time and the desire to have other people always reachable at a moment's notice. Several people told me that they felt naked without their cell phones on them at all times and that they sleep with their computers or cell phones in their beds with them! Many more keep the devices not too far away at night and feel uncomfortable and agitated when physically separated from them or when they must be turned off.' -- 'Kate Fox says that portable technologies help us restore the kind of continuous communication with our 'tribes' that was common in pre-industrial days. It is alienating to be physically separated from our friends and family, she argues. Cell phones reduce that alienation by restoring a kind of pre-modern sense of community in which people were in frequent, almost constant, contact. They return us, she says, to "the more natural and humane patterns of pre-industrial society."'

'“Poor folk love their cellphones!” [Bruce Sterling] said. “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.' -- “I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote an­other. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”'

"Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: "We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed." But just as not all information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality should be celebrated. We communicate with quick instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Although the culture that grows up around the cellphone is a "talk culture", it is not necessarily a culture that contributes to self-reflection. Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."

"Twitter, which emulates some of the salient features of Newspeak, is of course perfect for advertising—if you have to stop to think about what’s being said, the persuasion has probably failed. But the most insidious aspect of it is how it encourages us to speak in slogans and catchphrases, to eschew logical exposition of our thoughts for a quick, allusive declaration. Twitter is supposed to facilitate our relationships by providing “ambient awareness” of the lives of others, but it seems more a way of persuading us to provide a constant stream of information about ourselves to those sureveilling us. In a sense, it ceases to be communication in any conventional sense; instead it reduces communication to the bleeps of a homing beacon. Twitter is a way to become one’s own voluntary RFID tag." -- Information vs Communication. Message vs Massage.

'We are learning to see ourselves as cyborgs, at one with our devices. To put it most starkly: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture. But this is not a simple proposition, since our devices have become more closely coupled to our sense of our bodies and increasingly feel like extensions of our minds.' -- '"Being put on pause" is how one of my students describes the feeling of walking down the street with a friend who has just taken a call on his cell. "I mean I can't go anywhere; I can't just pull out some work. I've just been stopped in midsentence and am expected to remember, to hold the thread of conversation until he wants to pick it up again."

'Paro (a robotic seal-like creative) is able to make eye contact through sensing the direction of a human voice, is sensitive to touch, and has "states of mind" that are affected by how it is treated. In this session with Paro, the woman, depressed because of her son's abandonment, comes to believe that the robot is depressed as well. She turns to Paro, strokes him and says: "Yes, you're sad, aren't you. It's tough out there. Yes, it's hard." and then she pets the robot once again, attempting to provide it with comfort. And in so doing, she tries to comfort herself. The woman's sense of being understood is based on the ability of computation objects like Paro to convince their users that they are in a relationship. They are potent objects-to-think-with for asking the questions, posed by all machines that tether us to new socialities: "What is an authentic relationship with a machine?" "What are machines doing to our relationships with people?" And ultimately, "What is a relationship?"'

"3 objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone....strategies people adopted to help them remember to take these objects: Center of Gravity, Point of Reflection, Range of Distribution"