Quotes About Information

most Americans can be identified by name and address using only their ZIP code, birthday, and gender—

information is a commodity that can be processed by a machine.

our longstanding idea of a computer is obsolete.

The strip-mining of "relevant content" replaces the slow excavation of meaning. IT

we are "training our brains to pay attention to the crap.

Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I Zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski

What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

the amount of information a communication medium supplies is less important than the way the medium presents the information and the way, in turn, our minds take it in.

False news spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it."31

la Red atrae nuestra atención sólo para dispersarla.

The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to "vastly overvalue what happens to us right now," as Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris explains. We crave the new even when we know that "the new is more often trivial than essential."33

A 1989 study showed that readers of hypertext often ended up clicking distractedly "through pages instead of reading them carefully.

hypertext readers often "could not remember what they had and had not read.

The near-continuous stream of new information pumped out by the Web also plays to our natural tendency to "vastly overvalue what happens to us right now," as

The Net's interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment.

What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

We don't constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. The Web provides a convenient and compelling supplement to personal memory - but when we start using the Web as a substitute for personal memory, by bypassing the inner processes of consolidation, we risk emptying our minds of their riches.

The function of a great library is to store obscure books.

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.

As the costs of storing and retrieving information have collapsed, sharing expertise ought to be easy. But the cooperative approach based on openness and trust undermines the status of managers, whose wealth depends on the ability to create the impression that they have knowledge that their subordinates cannot be trusted to share.

hierarchical cultures of business and the state, where status determines access to information, and criticism is met with punishment. Nearly all of us work in hierarchies. Nearly all of us bite our tongues when we should speak freely. Yet few of the classic or modern texts on freedom of speech discuss freedom of speech at work, even though, as the crash of 2008 showed, self-censorship in the workplace can be as great a threat to national security as foreign enemies are.

The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power.

What is new to modernity is a rate of the obsolescence of truth...

Hild put together her information like a broken redcrest pavement and pondered the picture.