Some more insightful quotes from Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity — What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline:

“[T]he Internet can be a vibrant, brutal, loving, forgiving, deceitful, sensual, angry place. And of course, it is: it’s made of human beings.”

“[T]he Internet can be deranged place, but it’s that potential for the unexpected, even the insane, that so often redeems it.”

“Women want men to age with them. And men always head toward youth. A 32-year-old woman will sign up with a dating site, set her age-preference filters at 28–35, and begin to browse. That 35-year-old man will come along, set his filters to 24–40, and yet rarely contact anyone over 29. Neither finds what they are looking for. You could say they’re like two ships passing in the night, but that’s not quite right. The men do seem at sea, pulled to some receding horizon. But in my mind, I see the women still on solid ground, ashore, just watching them disappear.”

“[T]he color-coded ‘Threat Level’ that was such a part of the discussion in the years after 9/11 always felt to me like an elaborate advertisement for Halliburton. It’s hard to believe in information come to you on a “need to know basis” from an entity that doesn’t think you need to know anything. The concern becomes less about what they’re saying than why.”