The first-year students averaged 52 minutes per day on social networks such as Facebook. On average, they sent between 11 and 20 text messages per day and spent 45 minutes texting or talking on a cell phone. Most students had between 150 and 200 Facebook friends.

More significantly, Jacobsen’s analysis reveals that Facebook and cell phones facilitated face-to-face interactions for this group of students. Initially the researchers suspected that digital media would partially replace offline socializing. Instead they found that face time increased by 10 to 15 minutes for every hour spent with social media and cell phones.

Mobile penetration is expanding dramatically. The number given for 2007 is about 250 million subscribers in Africa and the numbers are continuing to rise very, very rapidly.

Uganda, the first African country to have more mobiles than fixed telephones, is cited as an example of cultural and economic transformation. Penetration has risen from 0.2% in 1995 to 23% in 2008, with operators making huge investments in infrastructure, particularly in rural areas. Given their low incomes, only about a quarter of Ugandans have a mobile subscription, but street vendors offer mobile access on a per-call basis. They also invite those without access to electricity to charge their phones using car batteries.Popular mobile services include money transfers, allowing people without bank accounts to send money by text message. Many farmers use mobiles to trade and check market prices.

The technology used to bring slum-dwellers like Das their first bank accounts is so advanced that it isn't available to even the most tech-savvy Americans

But today, some emerging economies are starting to leapfrog ahead. Why build a network of telephone wires out to remote areas when you can go straight to a cutting-edge mobile network at a fraction of the cost? Why burn fossil fuels for electricity and cooking if cleaner - and in some cases cheaper - alternatives, like solar and biogas, are available? Why electrify rural villages with incandescent bulbs if longer-lasting, environmentally friendly options like LEDs or new fluorescent bulbs exist? In many cases, it is mature markets like the United States and Europe, tethered to older systems, that find themselves playing catch-up.

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.

Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable people privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.

A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?” SIGMUND FREUD, Ernest Jones' Sigmund Freud: Life and Work

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. SIGMUND FREUD, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen ... but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. SIGMUND FREUD, Ronald W. Clark's Freud: The Man and His Cause

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)

"Avatar was a true classic of its time,

"Our hipper, bolder, and updated movie is sure to resonate with younger generations and older fans alike."

I raise an apostolic voice of warning about the potentially stifling, suffocating, suppressing, and constraining impact of some kinds of cyberspace interactions and experiences upon our souls. The concerns I raise are not new; they apply equally to other types of media, such as television, movies, and music. But in a cyber world, these challenges are more pervasive and intense. I plead with you to beware of the sense-dulling and spiritually destructive influence of cyberspace technologies that are used to produce high fidelity and that promote degrading and evil purposes.

Brothers and sisters, please understand. I am not suggesting all technology is inherently bad; it is not. Nor am I saying we should not use its many capabilities in appropriate ways to learn, to communicate, to lift and brighten lives, and to build and strengthen the Church; of course we should. But I am raising a warning voice that we should not squander and damage authentic relationships by obsessing over contrived ones.