Quotes About Technology

The message from Vega was still there; it had not evaporated. A thin line pulsed horizontally through the letters in her name. Cap knew it was because the screen was old, something to do with the monitor's magnetic field, but it made the word look alive, like it had a shaky little heart.

Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge. It was an old library, filled with old books and dusty old thoughts.

Beauvoir knew that almost everyone did four things, when faced with modern technology. First they created passwords. Then they forgot them. Then, on being forced to create new ones, they simplified and went with only one, which opened everything. And then they wrote it down. And hid that paper somewhere. That way they only had to remember the place, not the password

It smelled of the past, of a time before computers, before information was "Googled" and "blogged." Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge.

his cell phone didn't work in Three Pines, and neither did email. He almost expected to see messages fluttering back and forth in the sky above the village, unable to descend.

Reine-Marie picked up the top one and wondered, not for the first time, what the next generation of archivists and biographers would do. No one wrote letters anymore. No one had printed photographs and albums for historians, or even family members, to pore over. Everything was in a cloud and needed a password.

Phones were held high, recording the event. To be shown later to friends and relatives who hoped the dinner was delicious enough to warrant having to watch.

Antes de los portátiles y de las BlackBerry y del resto de las herramientas que confundían la información con el conocimiento.

Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that mistook information for knowledge.

It smelled of the past, of a time before computers, before information was "Googled" and "blogged." Before laptops and BlackBerries and all the other tools that

Even Google Maps doesn't have it," said Huifen. "And the GPS thinks we parked in the middle of the forest." "The middle of nowhere," said Jacques. "It's still recalculating," said Nathaniel. "She seemed quite concerned for us.

It's not called the world wide web for nothing. You can get sucked in and trapped there".

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

The single factor most responsible for the disruption of the family is the automobile. Its full effect cannot be assessed. Modern life, as we know, would be impossible without the ubiquitous motorcar. It broke up the old family and community.

The longbow would still have been used in the Napoleonic Wars if the raw mathematics of killing effectiveness was all that mattered, since both the longbow's firing rate and its accuracy were much greater than that of a smoothbore musket. But a frightened man, thinking with his midbrain and going "ploink, ploink, ploink" with a bow, doesn't stand a chance against an equally frightened man going "BANG! BANG!" with a musket.

Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

In the technological world...it is no longer a question of dominating nature or society in order to be more free or more happy, but of mastery for mastery's sake, of domination for the sake of domination. Why? For no end, precisely, or rather: because it is quite simply impossible to do otherwise, given the nature of societies entirely governed by competition, by the absolute imperative to 'advance or perish'.

Technologies as users interacting with other technologies as prompters, through other in-between technologies: this is another way of describing hyperhistory as the stage of human development

One of the most obvious features that characterizes any technology is its in-betweenness. Suppose Alice lives in Rio de Janeiro, not in Oxford. A hat is a technology between her and the sunshine. A pair of sandals is a technology between her and the hot sand of the beach on which she is walking.

ICTs are modifying the very nature of, and hence what we mean by, reality, by transforming it into an infosphere. Infosphere is a neologism coined in the seventies. It is based on 'biosphere', a term referring to that limited region on our planet that supports life. It is also a concept that is quickly evolving.

The great opportunity offered by ICTs comes with a huge intellectual responsibility to understand them and take advantage of them in the right way.

The technophile and the technophobe ask the same question. What's next?

When technologies are in-between human users and natural prompters, we may qualify them as first-order (Figure 13). Listing first-order technologies is simple. The ones mentioned earlier all qualify. More can easily be added, such as the plough, the wheel, or the umbrella. The axe is probably the first and oldest kind of first-order technology. Nowadays, a wood-splitting axe is still a first-order technology between you, the user, and the wood, the prompter. A saddle is between you and a horse.

In short, human intelligent design (pun intended) should play a major role in shaping the future of our interactions with each other, with forthcoming technological artefacts, and with the infosphere we share among us and with them. After all, it is a sign of intelligence to make stupidity work for you.