"Margeret Mead defined an ideal community as one that has a place for every human gift.  An ideal community would somehow keep the best of the old ways and add the best of the new.  We would have a mixing of races, generations, and viewpoints.  We could enjoy the intellectual and cultural stimulation of cities and the safety of friendly neighborhoods.  We'd have privacy and potluck dinners, freedom and civic responsibility.  All the adults would take responsibility to help all the children.  We would have connection without clannishness, accountability without autocratic control.  The ideal community would support individual growth and development and foster loyalty and commitment to the common good."

Mary Pipher, Ph.D., Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders, Riverhead Books, 1999

"For information to become knowledge, it must incorporate the relationships between ideas.  And for knowledge to be useful, the links describing how concepts interact must be easily accessed, updated, and manipulated.  Human intelligence is remarkable in its ability to perform all these tasks.  Ironically, it is remarkably weak at reliably storing the information on which knowledge is based.  The natural strengths of today's computers are roughly the opposite.  They have, therefore, become powerful allies of the human intellect because of their ability to reliably store and rapidly retrieve vast quantities of information.  Conversely, they have been slow to master true knowledge."
 

Raymond Kurzweil, "When Will HAL Understand What We Are Saying?", HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality, The MIT Press, 1997
 

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"To me, cyberspace is a state of possibilities - a place where space and time lose meaning as barriers, where the timeless, timely, and obsolete unite."

David B. Whittle, Cyberspace: The Human Dimension, W. H. Freeman and Co., 1996

 

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