Internet Quotes - page 63
I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.
Clay Shirky
The members of the Invisible College did not live to see the full flowering of the scientific method, and we will not live to see what use humanity makes of a medium for sharing that is cheap, instant, and global (both in the sense of 'comes from everyone' and 'goes everywhere.') We are, however, the people who are setting the earliest patterns for this medium. Our fate won't matter much, but the norms we set will. Given what we have today, the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change.
Clay Shirky
I did spearhead the introduction of the Internet in countries like Russia, the former Soviet Union, because it is a very open system of communication. I think it has great potential for self-organization and self-organization is very much at the heart of an open society. The Internet is sort of a medium of open society. However, it can also be a medium of control and so we have to be careful it doesn't destroy you.
George Soros
Twenty years ago no one could have imagined the effects the Internet would have: entire relationships flourish, friendships prosper...there's a vast new intimacy and accidental poetry, not to mention the weirdest porn. The entire human experience seems to unveil itself like the surface of a new planet.
J. G. Ballard
Don't you think something is fishy when the presstitutes orchestrate a fake news "humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela, but totally ignore the real humanitarian crises in Yemen and Gaza? Don't you think something is really very rotten when the expert, Alfred Maurice de Zayas, sent by the UN to Venezuela to evaluate the situation finds no interest by any Western media or any Western government in his report? Don't you think it is a bit much for Washington to steal $21 billion of Venezuela's money, impose sanctions in an effort to destabilize the country and to drive the Venezuelan government to its knees, blame Venezuelan socialism (essentially nationalization of the oil company) for bringing "starvation to the people"... As the United States is completely devoid of any print or TV media, it falls upon internet media such as this website to perform the missing function of honest journalism.
Alfred de Zayas
I first became aware of this larger phenomenon in the wake of the bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City. In the days and weeks to follow, I got dozens of calls from the press asking me whether there was legislation pending to ban bomb information on the Net. [...] In reality, of course, the "Internet as threat" meme was generated and disseminated primarily by the press itself.
Mike Godwin
Now that copyrights can be just about a century long, the inability to know what is protected and what is not protected becomes a huge and obvious burden on the creative process. If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities.
Lawrence Lessig
