Internet Quotes

The next digital literacy won't be about the nuts and bolts of how to use the web or a mobile phone, but how to set boundaries about when we let them encroach on our downtime.

education social media technology

...now there are other people watching and categorising us, manipulating our social lives for their purposes. The effect is that our seemingly random pathways through the web are actually determined by what we want to know and what we want to hear.

social media

We're becoming less interested in different ideas ... and opinions that clash with our own. ... Because of the way the technology encourages this by filtering out differences, the way we currently navigate the online world may result in social division instead of social cohesion.

social media

With hindsight, we can see how optimistic the people who populated the early internet were. They believed that the technology would expose how trivial our apparent differences are and lead us to greater global social harmony. After all, how can you hate someone because of their skin colour, nationality, religion, gender or sexuality if you discover a mutual affinity for the same kind of comedy... or music... Rather than creating a global group hug, we're coping with the vast information and possibilities online by going tribal.

social media society

[Social] networks, search engines and e-commerce sites are conceptually designed to reduce our concerns about privacy. The technologies themselves aren't passive. "These technologies are as neutral as guns", says Jim Adler.

social media technology

There are human value judgements in each of [Google's] core components. Someone at some point had to make a decision about them in order to program them in. And this is what we should be aware of: Google doesn't deliver information that's independent. It is a cyborg: part machine, part human. It filters our problems through a technological system that is, at its most basic level, subjective.

technology

[The importance Google places] on the number of links to a site stems from the philosophy that the crowd is always wise. Sure, it can be. But groupthink can also lead to dangerous booms and busts, like the South Sea Bubble, Tulip Mania, or the recent US mortgage crisis. As long ago as 1841, the author Charles MacKay worried about the "madness of crowds".

technology

We're so fearful of what [the web] will do to us and our institutions that we forget that we have the power to shape it ourselves... As much as we feel powerless and threatened by what is happening to us online, we have the ability and resources to fight against the things we feel are wrong. Insight and rationality are the greatest weapons against online hate. And thankfully, we have a lot of both.

society

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

modern life common sense information overload

And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form—www—takes three times longer to say than what it's short for).

The Internet has always been, and always will be, a magic box.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of "call waiting."

What, exactly, is the Internet?  Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a "modem" can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words.  Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The Net's interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

leverage

The Internet is like a vault with a screen on the back. I don't need hammers and bombs to get in when I can walk in through the door.

The Internet is an elite organization; most of the population of the world has never even made a phone call.

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago.  I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense.  It accentuates what you would do anyway.  If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone.  If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

A "killer app" will not be just a shrink-wrapped program that sells millions of copies.  A killer app will be any Web site that touches millions of people and helps them to do what they want to do.

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

Library-denigrators, pay heed: suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.

libraries

Getting information off the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

information overload

Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as conversation at a bar.

That's what's so great about the internet: it enables pompous blowhards to connect with other pompous blowhards in a vast circle-jerk of pomposity.

This is a little-known technological fact about the Internet. . .the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm.

The Internet has come to resemble an enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor, and a continuous stream of new books being added helter-skelter to the piles.

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an "information highway," but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.

The Internet, the world's largest ungoverned space.

The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.

The Internet is the Viagra of big business.

I get mail; therefore I am.

funny

Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don't care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.

business

The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That's a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.

computers prescient

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people––as remarkable as the telephone.

computers prescient

Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.