The wider world is a click away, but whether we mean to or not, we're usually filtering it out.

Creativity is an import-export business.

I fear that I can no longer travel without technology. Twenty years ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus. Now, I end up using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps. I probably eat and sleep better when I'm on the road, but I miss the mystery of travel when it was more random and unpredictable.

The uptake on mobile phones in Africa is phenomenal.

When I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1970s, 35-40% of an average nightly newscast focused on international stories.

Re-tweeting is a pretty common practice on Twitter, but on an average day, we see maybe one out of 20 posts is a re-tweet.

[According to Twitter] 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population.