Quotes About Technology

Online life is so delicious because it is socializing with almost no friction.

Social media technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, twitter, text messages to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one.

In 2013, for example, a seventeen-year-old Australian teenager living in England built a content-shortening app, called Summly, in his bedroom, which he promptly sold to Yahoo for a reported thirty million dollars. Now, imagine the next seventeen-year-old with a 3D printer, and you begin to sense the dimensions of the potential upheaval.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.

I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car.

People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes.

The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two very different spaces: the live venue, and the device that could play a recording or receive a transmission. Socially and acoustically, these spaces were worlds apart. But the compositions were expected to be the same!

The phonograph box in the parlor became a new venue; for many people, it replaced the concert hall or the club.

the ancient Greeks or Romans could have invented such a device; the technology wasn't beyond them. For all we know, someone at that time actually may have invented something similar and then abandoned it.

With the advent of recorded music in 1878, the nature of the places in which music was heard changed.

The technology is useful and convenient, but it has, in the end, reduced its own value and increased the value of the things it has never been able to capture or reproduce.

we now think of the sound of recordings when we think of a song or piece of music, and the live performance of that same piece is now considered an interpretation of the recorded version. What was originally a simulation of a performance—the recording—has supplanted performances, and performances are now considered the simulation.

Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford to visit, go to places that are too far away, or hear people sing about things you don't understand, about lives that are alien, sad, or wonderful. Recorded music can be ripped free from its context, for better and worse. It becomes its own context.

the space, the platform, and the software "makes" the art, the music, or whatever.

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

The explosive properties of gunpowder were first used in war by the Jin, the northern rivals of the Song, in 1221.

as Joel Mokyr has argued, technological innovation is unlikely to happen quickly where those who work lack wealth, education, and prestige, and those who are wealthy, educated, and have prestige know nothing about productive work.

It was possible to borrow British technology, and increasingly governments began to promote development. By the end of the nineteenth century, governments and large banks were actively managing industrial change.

A device that sits somewhere between the categories of "possible general method" and "for emergency use only / you're going to die method" is the Reverso.

eBooks are just digital copies of analog books. Convenient, yes. But we have the technology now to rethink what a book is.

Magic and new technology have always walked hand in hand - even back in the days of Robert Houdin.