Optimistic technologists and entrepreneurs often see the potential for positive societal transformation through technology-driven innovations, but it's becoming increasingly clear that a huge challenge faces the Always On world. The very nature of "On" means that information about you is flowing to the network. How can we manage the risks associated with the network knowing more and more about each of us?

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I see the increased public attention and the general level of clamoring as the beginning of full-scale social debate on a truly complex set of issues. As such, we will sometimes step sideways or even backwards. For example, halting research or rushing to legislation may only delay the process of really sorting out the issues.

How the Internet search engine Google is changing what we can find out about one another -- and raising questions about whether we should.

... But somewhere along the path toward changing our daily lives, Google changed our concept of time as well. It has helped make our past -- or oddly refracted shards of it -- present and permanent. That's a radical notion for a medium usually defined by its ability to constantly update itself.

... perhaps you once went on a rant ... You may think those chapters are closed. Google begs to differ.

"It's the collapse of inconvenience. It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it."

How would it be if what we take for human advance were simply a technological progress that literally leaves us out of its equations? What if Progress is not humanity striking out bravely towards the future, but an ultimately destructive force?

In a remarkable tour d'horizon, Paul Virilio paints a bleak picture of current scientific, cultural, social and political values.

Art has succumbed to the techniques of advertising and in politics, the battle for hearts and minds has become a mere convergence of opinion. TV ratings have triumphed over universal suffrage. The events of September 11 reflect both the manipulation of a global sub-proletariat and the delusions of an élite of rich students and technicians who resemble the 'suicidal members of the Heaven's Gate cybersect'.

The whiteboard in Duncan J. Watts's office at Columbia University was a thicket of squiggly blue lines, circles and calculus equations.

Mr. Watts, an associate professor of sociology, had just begun a passionate disquisition on the virtues and liabilities of scale-free networks when the telephone rang.

"Our young people, for the most part -- unless they are geniuses -- after a very short time in college give up any hope of being individually great. They plan, instead, to be good. They plan to be effective. They plan to do their job. They plan to take their healthy place in the community.

We might say that today it takes a genius to come out great, and a great man, a merely great man, cannot survive.

It has become our habit, therefore, to think that the age of greatness has passed, that the age of the great man is gone, that this is the day of group research, that this is the day of community progress.

The "modern times" of the early twentieth century saw the rise of the assembly line and the belief that standardization would make the world a better place. Yet along with greater production efficiency came dehumanization, as the division of labor created many jobs requiring mindless repetition rather than conscious involvement with work.

A few months ago I joined legions of other online narcissists and decided to start a Weblog ... Within a few days I was browsing through other blogs, ... and within a week, it hit me: the sites I was visiting were all run by men.

Web intelligence reflects the view that eventually we will build a totally new kind of collective intelligence on the Web computing infrastructure. To reach this goal we must solve several major problems. For example, embedding Web computing into our everyday lives and society poses a more difficult problem than engineers might think. Because new technologies often consume financial resources without providing a comparable benefit, we must pay close attention to the social aspects of intelligence and how Web computing can augment knowledge processes, an attitude that underlies social intelligence design.