quotations about the Internet
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.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
"Transience Is Now Permanence & the Fate of the Middle Classes", January 2010
The first person to see the video, a computer programmer in Houston, was stunned. He e-mailed the file to a list of twenty friends on his share list. The next person to view it seconds later lived in France and suffered from insomnia. In tears, she sent it to fifty friends. The third viewer was from South Africa and was so incensed at what he'd seen that he phoned the BBC and then did an e-mail blast to eight hundred of his "closest" mates on the Web. A teenage girl in Norway watched the video in horror and then forwarded it to every person she knew. The next thousand people to view it lived in nineteen different countries and shared it with thirty friends each, and they with dozens each. What had started as a digital raindrop in the Internet ocean quickly exploded into a pixel-and-byte tsunami the size of a continent.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Whole Truth
The internet today is an open platform where the demand for websites and services dictates success. You've got barriers to entry that are low and equal for all comers. And it's because the internet is a neutral platform that I can put on this podcast and transmit it over the internet without having to go through some corporate media middleman. I can say what I want without censorship. I don't have to pay a special charge. But the big telephone and cable companies want to change the internet as we know it. They say they want to create high-speed lanes on the internet and strike exclusive contractual arrangements with internet content-providers for access to those high-speed lanes. Those of us who can't pony up the cash for these high-speed connections will be relegated to the slow lanes ... We can't have a situation in which the corporate duopoly dictates the future of the internet and that's why I'm supporting what is called net neutrality.
BARACK OBAMA
podcast, Jun. 8, 2006
Most of us employ the Internet not to seek the best information, but rather to select information that confirms our prejudices.
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times, May 27, 2009
Media used to be one way. Everyone else in the world just had to listen. Now the internet is allowing what used to be a monologue to become a dialogue. I think that's healthy.
JOSEPH GORDON LEVITT
attributed, "How successful is Blade Runner in demonstrating a future for sociological street culture?", Academia
When the internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.
ERIC SCHMIDT
"Google Chief: My Fears for Generation Facebook", The Independent, August 17, 2010
Writing in a book about the Internet is like . . . uh, well, it's weird. And it's really hard. Is there anything the Internet is not about? Is there anything that's not on the Internet? I live in a world in which things somehow gain legitimacy by being represented via a vast computer network, a network that transforms things that were perfectly fine for a million jillion years into fodder for online message boards.
JOEL HENG HARTSE
Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll: My Life on Record
The Internet is like a giant jellyfish. You can't step on it. You can't go around it. You've got to get through it.
JOHN EVANS
attributed, Integrated Solutions with DB2
Rest assured, I was on the Internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
COMIC BOOK GUY
"The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", The Simpsons
There are massive efforts on the part of the internet's corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.
NOAM CHOMSKY
"Peace netter", The Guardian, October 16, 2002
Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change.
CLAY SHIRKY
"The Shock of Inclusion", January 2010
Everyone says that the internet is so awesome because you can connect with people from all over the world, but I think it's the opposite. The internet doesn't make it easier to connect with anyone--it just makes it so you don't really have to.
SARAH OCKLER
Bittersweet
When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend to either use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be indiscriminate about it. I mean, in the old days, it was tricky, you had to go to various encyclopedias, you had to go to the library, maybe spend a day there, whatever. But in the end, if you found something, it was really exciting. Now you hit a couple of buttons and you get some information. Which, by the way, is almost always presented in that same goddamn mediocre style that characterizes the Internet for me. It is slightly deadening.
NORMAN MAILER
Rolling Stone, May 3, 2007
Everyone knows that the Internet is changing our lives, mostly because someone in the media has uttered that exact phrase every single day since 1993.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
Nowadays, everybody assumes, when they wake up in the morning, if they have a question, it will get answered. Because they have the internet. No matter what the question is, someone will answer their question.
JACK WHITE
"The White Stripes uncut", The Guardian, November 14, 2004
The Internet is a big distraction. It's distracting, it's meaningless; it's not real. It's in the air somewhere.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Get Started in Writing a Novel
The Internet is like a massive focus group with uninhibited customers offering up their thoughts for free!
DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT
The New Rules of Marketing and PR
You are what you share.
CHARLES W. LEADBETTER
We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity
Using the Internet is like riding a Jet Ski; the rider is skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and able to focus only fleetingly on any one thing.
JIM TAYLOR
Raising Generation Tech
Trying to prevent customers from using the Internet is like trying to prevent a person from ordering french fries when they are at McDonald's.
ZONGQING ZHOU
E-commerce & Information Technology in Hospitality & Tourism