David Gelernter Quotes

We're all creating an archive of our own lives, whether we're aware of it or not.

I hate all the old pictures of me before 2010 - and they are always the first ones to come up. That's why I don't Google myself, man.

On social networking sites, we may expose ourselves, but we choose to do so. We are in control and, often wrongly, we do not feel we are giving away tradable data.

I have spent most of my adult life proving that I existed. A blog is an accessible way of doing this - there is a date and place in cyberspace that I existed a year ago, to the day, and the proof is still there.

Technology has forever changed the world we live in. We're online, in one way or another, all day long. Our phones and computers have become reflections of our personalities, our interests, and our identities. They hold much that is important to us.

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

It was a phenomenon I noticed many years ago. Young people were just giving up every bit of information about themselves they could.

The only danger about websites, you know, is people who remember something you did or said thirty or forty years ago, and bring it up against you, so you're going for a job and you don't get it.

Regarding social media, I really don't understand what appears to be the general population's lack of concern over privacy issues in publicizing their entire lives on the Internet for others to see to such an extent... but hey it's them, not me, so whatever.

You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

I'm a person who always wanted to turn my life into an archive. Social media made my dream come true.

Everything a teenager does, says or looks at, however transitory, contributes to an aggregated virtual self that might one day have consequences for its real-life counterpart. How many of us would keep all our relationships and reputations intact if every transgression, mistake or youthful folly was held in public view?

People want chat histories. They're a permanent testimony of a relationship.

On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next.

I don't tweet, I don't go on Facebook. I think there's too much information about all of us out there. I'm liking the idea of privacy more and more.

As we become so visible in the digital world and leave an endless trail of data behind us, exactly who has our data and what they do with it becomes increasingly important.

Online one day, you log in, and you realise, 'This is not me.' Everything you're posting, you're doing it in the context of everything you've posted before. Let's delete everything, save the stuff that's important, and then you only have to organise the one per cent that's worth keeping.

Everyone has made themselves into a commodity with Facebook, Twitter - with all of these things, you're commodifying your life every time you post an Instagram picture.

My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.

My kids grew up here. My son and daughter both went to Notre Dame.

I recognize that, to someone who doesn't know my history, maybe I seem like this guy who gets dressed up for the Internet.

You don't want to start writing songs about how your Twitter followers are going up, because one day Twitter won't exist, and you'll feel like an idiot.

People who want to know who I am, or my history, put my name into Google.

Just like I tell my daughters, first impressions are important, so once it's out there, whether it's a picture or a TV show, it's there; it's gonna be out there forever.

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay.