James Gleick Quotes:
Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we’re about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.
James Gleick
It is seldom right to say that anything is true ‘according to Google.’ Google is the oracle of redirection. Go there for ‘hamadryad,’ and it points you to Wikipedia. Or the Free Online Dictionary. Or the Official Hamadryad Web Site (it’s a rock band, too, wouldn’t you know).
James Gleick
Type ‘What is th’ and faster than you can find the ‘e’ Google is sending choices back at you: ‘What is the cloud?’ ‘What is the mean?’ ‘What is the American dream?’ ‘What is the illuminati?’ Google is trying to read your mind. Only it’s not your mind. It’s the World Brain.
James Gleick
Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.
James Gleick
We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are.
James Gleick
As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be good.
James Gleick
Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface.
James Gleick
I’m trying to look at many, many things in modern life that I believe are going faster, and I’m trying to look at why they’re going faster and what effect they have on us. We all know about FedEx and instant pudding, but it doesn’t mean we’ve looked at all the consequences of our desire for speed.
James Gleick
If instantaneity is what we want, television cannot compete with cyberspace.
James Gleick
A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It’s a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.
James Gleick
I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory.
James Gleick
Genes themselves are made of bits.
James Gleick
The word ‘code’ turns out to be a really important word for my book, ‘The Information.’ The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.
James Gleick
The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
James Gleick
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
James Gleick
Scientifically, information is a choice – a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world – writing, painting, music, money.
James Gleick
Information is crucial to our biological substance – our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires.
James Gleick
When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph.
James Gleick