Information Age Quotes

“It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.”
― Caleb Carr

“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information: extract for knowledge.

Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.

Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.

Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects against the media.”
― Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

“Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism.

First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut.

The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inflicted that cruel cut too.

The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too.

I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well.”
― Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet

“We are no longer in the dispensation of age and experience. We are in the era of knowledge and information. Information leads a true leader and a true leader leads others.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Being a patriot doesn't mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries.”
― Edward Snowden

“We the people have no excuse for starry-eyed sycophantic group-think in the Information Age. Knowledge is but a fingertip away.”
― Tiffany Madison

“Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems. The internet has not just open-sourced information, it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.”
― Mark Manson

“Society is on the road to the paradox of polarization and uniformity.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World

“Information, misinformation, disinformation, and data: We might not know what to call it, but we certainly are drowning in it.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“A new normal is establishing itself in which an undeclared or invisible war is fought entirely through algorithms, narratives, and manipulated media.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“The importance of epistemic security and cybersecurity is now comparable to that of national security.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“There is no such thing as social media, there is only unsocial media.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Karadeniz Chronicle: The Novel

“Maybe, as Mizuko said, we won't even really die, just carry on in the feedback loop we are stuck in. Instead of connecting with new things, widening our worlds, algorithms have shrunk it to a narrow chamber with mirrored walls.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“As computers replace textbooks, students will become more computer literate and more book illiterate. They'll be exploring virtual worlds, watching dancing triangles, downloading the latest web sites. But they won't be reading books.”
― Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian

“In the beginning, there was the internet: the physical infrastructure of wires and servers that lets computers, and the people in front of them, talk to each other. The U.S. government’s Arpanet sent its first message in 1969, but the web as we know it today didn’t emerge until 1991, when HTML and URLs made it possible for users to navigate between static pages. Consider this the read-only web, or Web1.

In the early 2000s, things started to change. For one, the internet was becoming more interactive; it was an era of user-generated content, or the read/write web. Social media was a key feature of Web2 (or Web 2.0, as you may know it), and Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr came to define the experience of being online. YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, along with the ability to comment on content, expanded our ability to watch, learn, search, and communicate.

The Web2 era has also been one of centralization. Network effects and economies of scale have led to clear winners, and those companies (many of which I mentioned above) have produced mind-boggling wealth for themselves and their shareholders by scraping users’ data and selling targeted ads against it. This has allowed services to be offered for “free,” though users initially didn’t understand the implications of that bargain. Web2 also created new ways for regular people to make money, such as through the sharing economy and the sometimes-lucrative job of being an influencer.”
― Harvard Business Review, Web3: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

“Know where to find the information and how to use it. That’s the secret to success.”
― Albert Einstein

“In other words, so far as many reputable studies are concerned, television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It's easy to mistake familiarity with computers for intelligence, but computer literate certainly doesn't equal smart. And computer illiterate sure doesn't mean stupid.
Which do we need more: computer literacy or literacy?”
― Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian

“As much as I love computers, I can't imagine getting an excellent education from any multimedia system. Rather than augmenting the teacher, these machines steal limited class time and direct attention away from scholarship and toward pretty graphics.”
― Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian

“Computers deliver an abundance of symbols yet offer an impoverishment of experience. Do our children need to see more icons, corporate logos, and glitzy fonts... or do they need more time climbing, running, and figuring out how to get along with each other?”
― Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian

“Don't forget that computer programming teaches students to think," says a friend of mine who's a computer jock in Silicon valley. He's deeply invested in technology and has no kids. "Programming is a logical system that rewards clear reasoning."
Uh, sure. Nineteenth-century schoolmasters used the same reasoning to justify teaching ancient languages. According to computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, "There is, so far as I know, no more evidence that programming is good for the mind than Latin is.”
― Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian

“Living in an age in which all types of information is accessible to everyone, blind faith is no longer a valid excuse.”
― Priscilla Vogelbacher, Hallowed Be Thy Name

“বর্তমান জগতে এ-ধারণা প্রায় সর্বব্যাপী যে, সত্য তথ্যেরই নামান্তর মাত্র। অতএব শিক্ষা মানেই তথ্যসংগ্রহ। সামাজিক মূল্য সবচেয়ে বেশি আজ "well-informed" মানুষের, অর্থাৎ সবজান্তার। উদারতম শিক্ষাব্যবস্থাতেও কোনো সত্যান্বেষী সংশ্লেষণী নীতির প্রভাব নেই। শুধু খবর, শুধু কতগুলি খবর কুড়োতে পারলেই বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ের উচ্চতম উপাধিলাভ সম্ভব। কেউ আমাদের বলেনি যে... আমরা বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ে এসেছি জ্ঞানের অন্বেষণে। দৈনিকপত্রের মতো বিভিন্ন, পরস্পরবিচ্ছিন্ন, তাৎপর্যহীন খবর কুড়োনোকেই আমরা জেনেছি শিক্ষা বলে।

("সাংবাদিকতা, ইতিহাস, সাহিত্য" প্রবন্ধ থেকে)”
― Buddhadeva Bose, সাহিত্যচর্চা

“For most of human history, ignorance was inevitable. There were limited channels for information to spread. As knowledge becomes more freely available, ignorance is increasingly a choice. Opening your mind to evidence that challenges your opinions opens the door to learning.”
― Adam Grant

“Nineteen eighty-two is as good a year as any to mark the threshold of a future we're still negotiating. It's been called the information age, the digital age, the new media age. It was the beginning of the "digital turn" that would, in fits and starts, transform music culture . . . .”
― Warren Zanes, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

“Understanding and wisdom are largely forgotten as we struggle under an avalanche of data and information.”
― Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age

“An altogether different temporality is inherent in information. It is a phenomenon of atomized time, namely of point-time. [...]

Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn, produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety. Atomization, individualization and discontinuity are also responsible for various forms of violence.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering

“It was October 17th, 2084 and stupid opinions were illegal in the United States of America. Up until 2059 stupid opinions had been very legal, very common, and extremely monetized. You could make lots of money off stupid opinions back before 2059. Some people made zounds of money talking about how stupid the stupid opinions were. Other people made zounds of money defending stupid opinions and building a platform on the idea that—no matter how stupid an opinion was—it was each American’s right to have and promote stupid and dangerous opinions. Few people talked about worthwhile opinions then. Worthwhile opinions were not exciting. They did not get likes or views. If something didn’t get likes or views back then, it didn’t exist.

But it was 2084. A stupid opinion had not been shared online for 25 years. The internet had atrophied. It was just a big store now. The big store mostly sold banana-flavored cigarettes. Almost everyone smoked banana-flavored cigarettes.”
― Stephen Nothum, Teething and Other Tales From the American Dystopia