We use words to coordinate thought, feeling, and action. Together, we speak our world into being.

Moment by moment, we speak ourselves into being.

When we speak, we express the divinity within us. We express as well our powers of creation, another of our godlike qualities. What we create with our words, before all else, is ourselves. The voice of consciousness that’s forever talking inside our head—that weird hybrid of monologue and dialogue that makes speaker and listener one—is the sculptor

But the entrepreneur’s vision of “a global community that works for everyone” was a fantasy. Human beings are not computers. The communities they form are not electronic networks. Society does not scale. What was missing from Zuckerberg’s manifesto was any sense of people as individuals, with their own backgrounds and beliefs, personalities and

By freeing the reader from his physical surroundings and local social group, the written word not only hastened the spread of knowledge; it fueled the rise of individualism.

By means of its media a society promotes values and sets norms, allocates praise and censure, promulgates models of conduct and character, motivates and coordinates action, and establishes hierarchies and other structures of power and status. Human nature may be largely fixed, but human behavior is always susceptible to social influence.

A communication medium, for Cooley, is not just a conduit for information. It is an instrument for regulating group behavior and belief.

Both men saw that how we communicate is even more important than what we communicate.

“Self and society are twin-born,” he wrote, “and the notion of a separate and independent ego is an illusion.”3 He believed in the existence of a “social mind” that’s more than the sum of its parts, and he came to see that the way people exchange information determines the workings of that collective intelligence.