Networked Society Quotes

My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.

The Internet is a clear example of how our lives have changed in ways we couldn't have imagined: a distributed information source, which is invisible to everyone, where you can access anything, and it's distributed throughout the whole world. Basically, communication is instantaneous.

When you have a few billion people connected with screens, not voice... screens are important. You can transmit a thousand times more information.

'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.

In effect, the Internet is a global connection of interconnected computers. It has been described as truly a peer-to-peer system with many distributed nodes and no central point of control architecture.

In the space of one lifetime, the Internet has opened up opportunities that were previously inconceivable.

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.

Web publishing can create common spaces; it all depends on how we, the readers and sometimes the producers, react to technological change. If we sort ourselves into narrow groups, common spaces will be in big trouble. But there's no reason not to have common spaces on the Internet. There are lots of them out there.

I believe that people are too complacent about technology.

The Web 2.0 world is defined by new ways of understanding ourselves, of creating value in our culture, of running companies, and of working together.

It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.

Without sounding too cliche, the Internet really is the birth of global mind.

Information technology and the Internet are rapidly transforming almost every aspect of our lives - some for better, some for worse.

The internet has become one of the motors of the 21st century economy, allowing all of us to reach a global audience at a click of a mouse and creating hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

The Internet, arguably the fastest world-changing invention since the Gutenberg printing press, has become the core of our social and business lives.

Living as we do in the age of Facebook, we shouldn't be surprised that some countries are starting to imagine themselves more as social networks than as a physical place.

Story was that human civilization started to develop with first social network. Emerged where population concentration was high. Helped propel to where we are now. Facebook is next step of creating a huge human brain to embrace hundreds of million, possibly billions of people.

Government, in many ways, is absolutely going to, if not already has, become irrelevant. It's not going to be in control anymore with the technologies that are coming down the pipe.

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

I grew up before computers. Computers are changing things, not all for the good.

On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile - right, you've seen people stop - all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network.

The Internet changes the structure of society all the time — this massiveness made of individuals.

When I wrote 'The World Is Flat,' I said the world is flat. Yeah, we're all connected. Facebook didn't exist; Twitter was a sound; the cloud was in the sky; 4G was a parking place; LinkedIn was a prison; applications were what you sent to college; and Skype, for most people, was a typo.