My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

People have just assumed that... if we call our Facebook acquaintances our friends, we must be influenced by them, too. But we're not.

Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve.

We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. That's clearly not the case when it comes to social systems.

What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions.

Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades.

There are very fundamental reasons we live our lives in social networks and if we really understood the role they're playing in our society we would take better care of social networks and find ways to take advantage of their power to improve our society.