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The Rise of the Social Nervous System

March 13, 2009
by Joshua-Michele Ross
Vice President, O'Reilly Media's Radar group

Joshua-Michele Ross

No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.

There are now at least 1.6 billion of us connected via computer and three billion mobile devices that touch the Internet. The rise of “social” technologies–such as wikis, blogs, Twitter, SMS and social networks–means that the barriers to participation across the planet (in terms of the cost, access and skills required) are rapidly approaching zero.

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