Sufjan Stevens Quotes

If it's on the Internet, then it's gotta be true.

Twitter is an astounding platform for information, but it's a total blank slate - which means it's an astounding platform for disinformation, too.

Although the Internet could be making all of us smarter, it makes many of us stupider, because it's not just a magnet for the curious. It's a sinkhole for the gullible.

We thought the Internet would enlighten everyone, but it's given everyone access to more ignorance, and given ignorant people an opportunity to organize themselves and congregate.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

I have been involved in Internet-related policy for approximately one decade, and I have been using the Internet myself for almost that period of time.

Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time, never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.

Everybody's saying, be skeptical of Wikipedia. That is true. They should also be skeptical of everything. We should all be critical consumers of the media.

Wikipedia is so dangerous.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

You don't want to believe everything you read on the Internet.

I do know one thing: it's best not to read the Internet.

Twitter is one of those dangerous toys that if it gets in the hands of the wrong person you'll have the mind of a 12-year-old masquerading as an adult.

What is the point of teaching how to analyse a poem or a piece of Shakespeare but not to analyse the Internet?

There's a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don't have to think, you just have to get more information - gets very dangerous.

Just because you've Googled something doesn't mean you've learned.

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

2012 was the year I saw Twitter as a negative. More people need to realise that not everything they read is true and that Internet trolls are a real problem.

Search engines take misinformation and put it into our echo chamber. Trying to counter it is the functional equivalent of having your hair full of honey and bees and your trying to whack the bees with your hands.

Facts are incidental if not accidental, and the problem that we have as a society is that there is a significant number of people who have grown up in a different information environment ... surrounded by much more information, but whose provenance is not clear.... The rumors will be believed; the fiction will be thought of as fact; and the political agendas, among other agendas, will be influenced by interest groups who are coming from some quite strange trajectory to issues based on collective understanding that is founded on falsity.

We are not going to do ourselves any favors by buying into what's printed in newspapers.

What's weird is that anybody can write anything, and once it goes online, it's permanent. My very first biography on IMDb, which was written by a manager I had at the time, was not true.

Because the Internet is so new, we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the Web.