Paul Virilio Quotes

Technology has miniaturized the globe, reducing vast oceans to mere ponds. Distant countries are now almost neighbors as our bodies travel faster than the speed of sound and our voices at the speed of light. ... Today the world is not much bigger than a ball spinning on the finger of science.

I think technology is us, not something we invented. I think we are more psychic now because we have cell phones and you can look and see who's calling you. When people start seeing technology as us, as humanity, our whole idea of what existence is, is going to shift.

Today's China is not in the least shut out from the rest of the world. Trends come to us from all over the world. And the Internet is really developed in China. We get news from all over the world.

The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing.

I mean, the nation in which we live - and the world in which we live - is so extraordinarily more like a future than the futures that we're being sold on the screen and on television.

Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press.

Humankind is getting more and more connected.

The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.

I can watch CNN on television or the Internet to find out what happened in Hong Kong ten minutes ago. After all, it doesn't matter where something is made, we're all part of the same big family now.

Greater technological connectivity makes the world wider, and the walls of isolation - thinner.

Over the last few years, the world has become a smaller and more integrated place with technology that is leveling the playing field like never before.

Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.

It's not that we use technology, we live technology.

The notion of the world as a village is becoming a reality.

This is a very different world. Much of it is new. What has happened is that information technology has politicized the world…It’s a world where most of the big problems spill over national boundaries.

We have collapsed distances, taken down walls, and spread information.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Men knew little, formerly, of what was passing beyond ... their own immediate neighborhood, but now, through the ... newspapers ... town and country, state and nation, and the most distant parts of the world are brought together, and whatever is new, rare and important, is conveyed with rapidity to every reader ... set forth in the most succinct manner, and in a style adapted to the comprehension of all.

We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, "I speak as a citizen of the world" without others saying, "God, what a nut.

As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world

Globalization is the speed of light.

Just beyond the horizon of current events lie two possible political futures -- both bleak, neither democratic. The first is a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened Lebanonization of national states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe -- a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and civic mutuality. The second is being borne in on us by the onrush of economic and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize the world with fast music, fast computers, and fast food -- with MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global network: one McWorld tied together by technology, ecology, communications, and commerce. The planet is falling precipitantly apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment