“The critics of new media often point to its failure to live up to the standards of old media. Some scientists and science journalists wring their hands at the idea that the Mars landers and the Large Hadron Collider emanate information in the form of anthropomorphized Twitter messages, arguing that these messages lack the formal virtues of science reporting and papers.

“It’s true. They do. They don’t succeed at being better in-depth science articles than the science articles. They succeed at being better Twitter messages than science articles; they succeed at producing and sustaining a different kind of interest and understanding than a long article in the weekend paper.

“The low cost of deploying new media online is revealing a heretofore unsuspected appetite for stories in different boxes than we’ve heretofore used — and a universe of stories waiting to be told.” -Cory Doctorow, “Don’t Judge New Media by Old Rules“

“Which was more likely to happen first: the spontaneously generated idea of an afterlife in which the disembodied soul, liberated from the restrictions of time and space, experiences eternal bliss, or the accidental discovery of hallucinogenic plants that give a sense of euphoria, dislocate the center of consciousness, and distort time and space, making them balloon outward in greatly expanded vistas? … the latter experience might have had an almost explosive effect on the largely dormant minds of men, causing them to think of think of things they had never thought of before. This, if you like, is direct revelation.” –Mary Barnard, as quoted by Huston Smith

“She leaned over and kissed his cheek. Every hair on his body stood at attention and he felt sweupt into the warm wind that blasted him when she got out of the car. He was lying on the horizon — his body was the mounain and his hair was the Santa Anas and his eyes were planets.” -Francesca Lia Block, Wasteland