The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It's to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion.

I like to have met someone in real life before being their Facebook friend.

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.

It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying.

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 media and the Internet haven't changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes.

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.