Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes an intriguing article about why social media appears to have gone tribal, influencing the rest of society.  Surprisingly, our perception may not be the case.  After all, social networks are designed to give us what we want. Is it possible we want tribalism?

Given the many life and death threats facing our species, an algorithm to help identify which challenges are imminent and which can wait five minutes sounds great. Unfortunately, technology is part of the problem. The more we rely on it, the more we are likely to find ourselves in a d

Over the holidays, a couple  introduced me to their son who was visiting from Boston.  As he was a young man, I asked what he did for a living.  He said he was a medical researcher and was working on a drug for multiple sclerosis.  A lump hardened in my throat as I remembered a br

The title of this blog says it all.   On Facebook, our data doesn’t belong to us.  Ditto our “authorial rights” according to information scientist, Amelia Acker at the University of Texas at Austin.  (“Preservations Acts,” by Nora Caplan-Bricker Harper’s Magazine, Dec.

In my freshman year in college, I discovered The Communist Manifesto was on my reading list.  After years of hearing the book was pure evil, I gasped.  A few pages into the material, however, and  I learned what I’d been told was nonsense. What’s wrong comaraderie?  Coca-Cola

What frightens me about the generation that is building technologies to exploit the internet is its youth.  I fear these visionaries are too inexperienced to be left in total control.  Mark Zuckerberg’s motto, “Move fast and break things,” reflects the same rebellious attitude

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 65 million years.  They may have managed it because they had  small brains.  They didn’t possess enough grey matter to imagine how to tinker with their environment.  Homo sapiens used theirs  to disrupt the planet.  So many changes are  far f

Four years ago, I wrote a blog in which I quoted 29- year-old Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, as saying young people were smarter than anyone else.  (Click) By my math, he turned 34 on May 14 of this year, and when I read his recent testimony before Congress, I had to smile. (Clic

My father taught me the difference between truth and a lie when I was five.  The story begins with a teddy bear, a tiny, plastic ornament that hung at the end of my toothbrush. I loved to watch it in the bathroom mirror, bouncing up and down as I cleaned my teeth.  One day, the tedd

Mark Zuckerberg and his nerdy cohorts have  a dream to turn the internet into a global village that will spread ideas and possibly democratic seeds to all parts of the world.  (“Connection can breed contempt,” by Jamelle Boule, excerpted from Slate in The Week, May 5, 2017, pg.