Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can't meet.

Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information.

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts thought from action.

We know how to punish retailers and manufacturers that don't provide quality and value. But we're lousy at fighting effectively for what we really need - reliable insurance policies affordable health care safe, healthy food.

Technology makes the world a new place.

Life is good when you live from your roots. Your values are a critical source of energy, enthusiasm, and direction. Work is meaningful and fun when it's an expression of your true core.

The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.

Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened perhaps it didn't. Without the layeredrichness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.

Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.

Technological change defines the horizon of our material world as it shapes the limiting conditions of what is possible and what is barely imaginable. It erodesassumptions about the nature of our reality, the pattern in which we dwell, and lays open new choices.

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence inthe possibility of certain knowledge.