From the moment America went full-on industrial, it seems like it's been a steady path towards people never having to be physically present in order to satisfy their needs.
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
Four years ago nobody but nuclear physicists had ever heard of the Internet. Today even my cat, Socks, has his own web page. I'm amazed at that. I meet kids all the time, who have been talking to my cat on the Internet.
We're all swimming in this digital revolution that we live in.
There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology... the new way of killing time.
With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.
I don't have a Facebook or a Twitter account, and I don't know how I feel about this idea of, "Now, I'm eating dinner, and I want everyone to know that I'm having dinner at this time." or "I just mailed a letter and dropped off my kids." That, to me, is a very strange phenomenon.
It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog.
We just get comfortable in our routines, and that's how it worked before, but now you can see wrestling from around the world and all the promotions, and everyone has something online you could see. And many years ago, you could do these routines, and they weren't routines to the fans because they didn't see them as much.
If you're the village blacksmith and a model T comes along, you better become a mechanic. People's lives are better when they get news online versus having to wait for the morning paper. It's a lot more efficient, a lot more real time, a lot less waste.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
We should be happy. We should be enjoying that there is all this bounty. Somebody can take an iPod and have all the world's music at their beck and call in an instant. What an amazing thing!
Since Graham Bell came up with telephony, it took 100 years for the way the technology has impacted our lives, the way we perceive the world.
'Free' is the museum show of our times, presaging the whole Wikileaks dustup, and it shows shifting power dynamics and a glimpse of the human in a world of flowing data.
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.
There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives.
We are steering a course between a kind of computer age Scylla and Charybdis—between the shoals of suffocating regulation on the one side and the rocks of unfettered monopolies on the other.
'Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way.
What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.
When I was born, the Internet was barely two years old. It was the preserve of academics, used to connect dozens rather than billions of users. There weren't many who predicted it would transform our world.
It's a modern world we live in, with everything at our fingertips, and if it's not at our fingertips, you can dot-com anything.
The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
The past two decades revolutionized the way we access information. You and I can have our questions answered with the click of a mouse at any time of day. If America, both corporation and citizen alike, can use these services to solve problems, why can't Washington?
We have created a Star Wars civilization but we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That's dangerous.
I'm not into social media. I'm like from another century.
