We as a nation need to be reeducated about the necessary and sufficient conditions for making human beings human. We need to be re...educated not as parents--but as workers, neighbors, and friends; and as members of the organizations, committees, boards--and, especially, the informal networks that control our social institutions and thereby determine the conditions of life for our families and their children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many more children observe attitudes, values and ways different from or in conflict with those of their families, social networks,... and institutions. Yet today's young people are no more mature or capable of handling the increased conflicting and often stimulating information they receive than were young people of the past, who received the information and had more adult control of and advice about the information they did receive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Information networks straddle the world. Nothing remains concealed. But the sheer volume of information dissolves the information.... We are unable to take it all in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be perfectly, brutally honest, those of us who are still carrying diaper everywhere we go are not at our most scintillating tim...e of life....We need to remember that at one time in our lives, we all had senses of humor and knew things that were going on in the world. And if we just keep our social networks open, there will be people ready to listen when we once again have intelligent things to say.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Isn't it odd that networks accept billions of dollars from advertisers to teach people to use products and then proclaim that chil...dren aren't learning about violence from their steady diet of it on television!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both terrorist groups and cults tend to become countercultures with their own codes of behavior into which each new recruit is ind...octrinated. The activities of both tend to be on or beyond the fringes of socially acceptable behavior. It has long been established in the study of cults that any deviant group will attract individuals who have a grievance or feeling of deprivation, provided the group offers some explanation or remedy. We have seen that the same is true of terrorist groups. Populations with similar or shared grievances or feelings of deprivation constitute a pool of possible converts. In the case of cults, it was further found that social networks--similar ethnic, social, educational, or other relationships existing before the recruitment takes place--are highly influential in determining who among the many in the pool are most likely to be among the few who are recruited. Despite the greater heterogeneity of personality types among terrorists in general, there appears to be a remarkable homogeneity in terms of social networks within specific groups.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything el...se, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning... Flies on the shafted disc, declaims the morning And tells the windy weather in the cock.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The community and family networks which helped sustain earlier generations have become scarcer for growing numbers of young parent...s. Those who lack links to these traditional sources of support are hard-pressed to find other resources, given the emphasis in our society on providing treatment services, rather than preventive services and support for health maintenance and well-being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »