“The role(s) we adopt or play in social media environments have a more complex anatomy and produce more profound and sophisticated sequelae than anyone is yet equipped to imagine. As infants, we created and endowed the basic structures and character of our present and future minds through role-based forays into human and natural cultures and relations. As adults, we are repeating an abstraction of that process in our virtual social behavior, and we are at least as naive about this as we were about that, probably more so; since nearly no one is immune.

No one has any idea what the cognitive, social and relational repercussions of this might be. Even your most celebrated prophets cannot foresee the rising shapes of these developmental dynamisms, but what we can do — what we should and must do — is explore them together, with and for each other and our world — before our position and access are exploited against us by the inhuman forces inherent in the cultures we assemble and their inner rhythms of creativity and violent eruptions of overstructure familiar from the heartbeat of human history.

We must become the pioneers of our own incredible situation. Now.”

— overheard nearby