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Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses. “Did you see Babies?” asks Lois Nachamie, a couples counselor who for years has run parenting workshops and support groups on the Upper West Side. She’s referring to the recent documentary that compares the lives of four newborns—one in Japan, one in Namibia, one in Mongolia, and one in the United States (San Francisco). “I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.”

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Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and her co-researchers demonstrated that people are more likely to remember things when they think they won’t be able to find them using a computer and vice versa.

The researchers also showed that people are even better at remembering where facts are stored than they are at remembering the fact itself.

Social media primarily played an organizing role during the 2008 races, with campaign staffs largely in charge of their candidates' social media presence and interaction with supporters, said Mindy Finn, a new media adviser to Republican candidates. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Finn predicted, social media power will become more decentralized with supporters and oppo

nts forcing candidates to address issues they might otherwise avoid. "I don't think we're going to see the most interesting or impactful ideas coming out of the c

Something similar happened on an internal level while Phillips was an adviser to Obama's 2008 campaign, Phillips told the audience.

"Next time a teenager says, 'Mom if I don't have a phone,' or 'Dad, if I don't have a phone, I'm going to be a nobody,' they are being serious," said Robbie Blinkoff, Context's principal anthropologist. Blinkoff and his colleagues studied the behavior of 144 cell-phone users between the ages of 16 and 40 from several countries and found that teenagers were so immersed in the technology that they often saw little difference between meeting face to face and talking on the phone. A common scene they observed was a group of teenagers sitting together -- all with ears glued to cell phones -- talking with faraway friends rather than to each other.

While saying he didn't think the cell-phone-toting teens were intentionally acting rude, he said he suspects that a new kind of "digital divide" has been created, similar to the gap among PC haves and have-nots.