Quotes About Information

Wikipedia represents the most powerful new business model of the twenty-first century: open source.

McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.

In general the left hemisphere participates in the analysis of information," says a neuroscience primer. "In contrast, the right hemisphere is specialized for synthesis; it is particularly good at putting isolated elements together to perceive things as a whole.

Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard of living in much of the developed world that would have been unfathomable to our great-grandparents.

When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.

In a world of perfect information and low transaction costs, the parties will bargain to a wealth-maximizing result.

Asymmetrical information creates all sorts of headaches. If the seller knows much more about the product than the buyer, the buyer understandably gets suspicious. What's the seller concealing?

a world of perfect information and low transaction costs, the parties will bargain to a wealth-maximizing result.

Buyers today aren't "fully informed" in the idealized way that many economic models assume. But neither are they the hapless victims of asymmetrical information they once were.

When buyers can know more than sellers, sellers are no longer protectors and purveyors of information. They're the curators and clarifiers of it—helping to make sense of the blizzard of facts, data, and options. "If a customer has any question at all

The purpose of a pitch isn't necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you. In a world where buyers have ample information and an array of choices, the pitch is often the first word, but it's rarely the last.

Nowadays, everyone—whether we're the head of an organization or its freshest hire—faces a torrent of information. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.

If the knowledge is spread, it cannot be stamped out.

Some unspoken human communication is taking place on a hidden channel. I did not realize they communicated this much without words. I note that we machines are not the only species who share information silently, wreathed in codes.

In general, the Internet was not designed to accommodate deliberate failures to communicate.

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

They vie with one another in offering attractive, "informative" accounts and images of the world. They are free to speculate on the facts, to bring new facts into being, to demand answers to their own contrived questions.

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.

Librarians and other information specialists have developed user's guides to evaluating websites. These include questions we should ask, such as "Is the page current?" or "What is the domain?" (A guide prepared by NASA is particularly helpful.)

As the American Library Association presciently concluded in their 1989 report Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, students must be taught to play an active role in knowing, identifying, finding, evaluating, organizing, and using information.

We're assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumor, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting, and at the same time, we are all doing more.

It no longer makes sense for teachers to consider their primary function to be the transmission of information. As the New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik put it, nowadays, by the time a professor explains the difference between elegy and eulogy, everyone in the class has already Googled it.

Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.