Technology and the Internet are not just changing politics here in the U.S. It's also happening abroad. In the Philippines, where I grew up, grassroots organizers used text messaging to help overthrow a president.
That definitely I feel is part of my generation: social networking, communication over the Internet, whether it's Skype or IRC or some form of text-based chat, text messaging.
E-Commerce is happening the way all the hype said it would. Internet deployment is happening. Broadband is happening. Everything we ever said about the Internet is happening. And it is very, very early. We can't even glimpse it's potential in changing the way people work and live.
In our world, we have so many ways we can escape with technology, like TV, Facebook, computers, text messaging and all that.
There is some argument about who actually invented text messaging, but I think it's safe to say it was a man. Multiple studies have shown that the average man uses about half as many words per day as women, thus text messaging. It eliminates hellos and goodbyes and cuts right to the chase.
Pretty soon we'll have robots in our society, you're going to have a lot of automated processes that used to be done by people - this is happening. Society and technology is changing so fast, and the impact of the change on society and technology is global, not local.
Our generation grew up with technology. It evolved as we grew up. This new generation has had it since they were babies. That's crazy. It fundamentally changes they way they understand and think about technology. They've never known life without it, whereas we knew life without the Internet.
I have mixed feelings about how fast things are changing as a result of technology. There's no denying that through technology there are amazing things being created that help people with diseases or help people's dreams come true. But there's also this obsession. Social media is the most dangerous of them all.
The dirty little secret that nobody likes to talk about is that things just might have been better before the Internet. We had more time to ourselves before cell phones and text messaging and Facebook consumed our lives.
I'm very persistent; I know the Internet very well, because I grew up on the Internet. I had Internet when there was just dial-up, and the Internet was my social outlet.
There's nothing wrong with sending a quick note if you're busy or just want to flirt, but it's hard to have any real interaction over text. In the buffet of communication, text messaging should be a side dish, not the entree.
I used to have a BlackBerry. E-mail and text messaging and all those things that make life so much easier now.
I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can't just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it's really in how the technology is used. What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we're going.
Technology is something you have to embrace because technology is part of our generation. Digital natives, for instance, are people who grew up in a world that always had the Internet and who always had smartphones. Millennials aren't too far behind: my generation of people, who were in the mix of the Internet when it first came out.
I was elected because I believed in what we call "grassroots politics," politics from the bottom up, not the top down.
As someone who grew up in a house where there wasn't a lot of talking, I'm used to just looking at the world. And in general I often feel like I just don't understand what's happening. That everybody else does, but I don't quite get it.
In 1995, we had evidence of the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden being in the Philippines, living in the Philippines. We had evidence of front organizations set up in the Philippines. And we uncovered evidence about, which would help the U.S. with - about the perpetuators of the World Trade Center bombing.