Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it’s seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don’t share that pessimism because I think it is one...
Radical transparency has an enormous impact on our personal lives. We can no longer share thoughts, quips, photos or personal opinions anywhere on the web without being mindful that they may turn up where we least expect it (notably job interviews, d...
This is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny little world. Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny little worlds, they come together in th...
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the Obamacare tech nightmare is how wholly predictable it all was. Anyone who has been involved in building the most rudimentary of web operations knows nothing ever works as it's supposed to. Even awesome Apple, m...
Right now I am kicking around an idea to do a web talk show on a boat. Guests would come on and go fishing with me. I would like to take people who have never fished: You get them out on the water and they really open up.
The Web meant that I didn't have to schlep a whole bunch of stuff to a museum and fight with all their constraints and make something that, in the end, only 150 people would actually get out to see. Instead, I could put something together in my lab a...
Facebook is about seeing what your friend is doing. Twitter, you follow different people. Flipboard is about passions and interests and topics, and so it's the same social web that all of these products are letting you look at, but Flipboard is comin...
Journalism is being pushed into a space where I don't think it should ever go, where it's trying to support the monetization model of the Web by driving page views. So what you have is a drop-off of long-form journalism, because long-form pieces are ...
Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, ...
When we launched If WeRanTheWorld, I said to my team, I want us to innovate in every aspect of how we design and operate this as a business venture, as much as the web platform itself - because I want us to design our own startup around the working l...
I was telling somebody just the other day, there's technically such a hierarchy in this business. You have film, that's the ideal; then you have TV, and things like web series do not claim as much cred, but the fact is, if the material is solid and I...
It's 5 P.M. at the office. Working fast, you've finished your tasks for the day and want to go home. But none of your colleagues have left yet, so you stay another hour or two, surfing the Web and reading your e-mails again, so you don't come off as ...
I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magic...
I was always very curious about what a scientist's life was like when I was young. Of course, when I was young, you didn't have very many opportunities to find out with no web, TV. I was very lucky: I was born in the city of Chicago and went to the U...
I had learning problems when I was in elementary school, and didn't really start to read well until high school. I never read any of the middle grade classics that were popular when I was young - 'Harriet the Spy', 'Charlotte's Web', 'The Witch of Bl...
This sick strange darkness comes creeping on so haunting everytime And as I stared I counted the webs from all the spiders catching things and eating their insides Like indecision to call you And hear your voice of treason Will you come home and stop...
You can be in Ohio and shoot your own web series, if you want. If this had been around when I was in high school, I can guarantee you that my friends and I would have been shooting our own television shows and putting them online and trying to get as...
A falcon hovers at the edge of the sky. Two gulls drift slowly up the river. Vulnerable while they ride the wind, they coast and glide with ease. Dew is heavy on the grass below, the spider's web is ready. Heaven's ways include the human: among a tho...
Webs are made mostly of spaces. They break easily. They barely exist. They belong to the category of half-things: mist, smoke, shrouds, ghosts, membranes, retinas or rags; and they quickly fill up with un-things: old legs and wings and heads and holl...
Twitch is a platform. Switch it on, and you'll find thousands of channels of pure gameplay rolling around with people talking in the background. Dig a little deeper, and you'll also find people talking on camera, with sets built like an actual talk s...
Several authoritarian regimes reportedly propose to ban anonymity from the web, making it easier to find and arrest dissidents. At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led net crackdown. We operate in about 150 countries around the g...
