I think it was Samuel Johnson who said, "There are two kinds of information in this world: that what you know and that what you know where to get." The tools help the latter, and that's what keeps us from going nuts. The sense of overload comes from the gap between that sudden jump in volume (of information) and the tools we have to make sense of it.

Any thinking person is qualified to be a forecaster, and in fact, everybody does it every day.

I've actually tried not to call myself a futurist for the last 25 years. I prefer "forecaster," but people call me a futurist, and it doesn't really bother me.

As Stewart Brand (co-founder of Emeryville's Global Business Network) likes to say, "Information lasts forever. Digital information lasts forever or for five years, whichever comes first." There are examples everywhere. The tapes from the original Viking landers that went to Mars are at (NASA's) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but there is no machine that can read the tapes.

This new world of personal media - the Web, the Internet and et cetera - not only delivers the world to your living rooms, but everywhere. And we get to answer back. And we're expected to answer back.

"Point of view" is that quintessentially human solution to information overload, an intuitive process of reducing things to an essential relevant and manageable minimum... In a world of hyperabundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources...

Hipness is the only asset that matters.