“I think the Internet is comparable to the Homestead Act: Here’s a parcel of land, sign up, cultivate it, it’s yours. There’s all this land out there right now.”

Dan Abrams

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“I do think that socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.”

Aaron Sorkin

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“Amazingly, America—the birthplace of the Internet—is the only developed nation that does not teach programming in its public schools.”

Douglas Rushkoff

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“The one thing that’s a bit of a drag is the hyper-dominance of Facebook and Twitter, [which] feels really monolithic and dull to me. I don’t like the way they look, I don’t like the way they feel. I feel like they’re huge Soviet apartment blocks that we’ve all been forced to live in. And if you want to really reach a lot of people, you bloody well better get yourself an apartment there. But it’s going to look like everyone else’s apartment, and you’re going to have to communicate through their Soviet centralised communication system. I don’t even think the metaphor is a bad one; because everyone is watching. Certainly the advertisers are watching. That’s why these entities are so valuable.”

Jennifer Egan

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“It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances—no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.”

Jeffrey Rosen

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“In the age of Google, when everything you say is forever searchable, the future belongs to those who leave no footprints.”

Thomas L. Friedman

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“The key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.”

Andrew Sullivan

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“The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students…It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.”

David Brooks

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