James Gleick Quotes

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

Future shock is the disorientation that affects an individual, a corporation, or a country when he or it is overwhelmed by change and the prospect of change ... we are in collision with tomorrow.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

I have found here in America a philosophic revolution, philosophically effected.

With science, technology and globalization, man is changing the world faster than his evolution can keep up with the new dangers.

The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.

[The PlayStation 2 is a] historic, a mass-market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the way the printing press did.

If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing-press.

A global society is coming into being, a global society that is made out of information that was not intended to be ours, but is ours, by the mistaken invention of computers and the printing press, information is power, and information has spilled by the clumsy hands of the dominator culture so that the information is everywhere, never before has the situation been so fluid, we might be able to finally have a crack at this

I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom.

We can trust technology to effect change - that's a given.

Only a world spinning out of control could inspire the music and vision we have now.

Society is changing constantly, and changing faster than we think.

Nothing truly bad happens. There's always good and bad in any changes.

Movies are arguably the most influential, important medium in the world. They have a tremendous cultural impact. Because women are now making movies, then women's ideas, philosophy, point of view will seep into that culture. And that's never happened in history. Ever, ever, ever. We can't even see the impact of that yet.

Technology's become the great prism for what's going on in the world.

I would love to see what's going to happen with science fiction with peoples' heads, because we still have people running around in the year 2050 or 2100 or 2200 and they have incredible technology and you see the effects: laser beams and rays and beaming down and beaming up. Incredible technical things happening, but everybody is still running around jealous, fighting, whacking, cheating. There's got to be something going on! Some kind of change. I'd like to see something starting to happen in that area, with the psychology of the human being and how that changed.

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.

If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.

We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.

I'm not so sure he's wrong about automobiles," he said, "With all their speed forward they may be a step backward for civilization-that is, spiritual civilization ... But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us expect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace.

Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.

When I look at certain aspects of popular culture - not everything because I like a lot of things - sometimes my heart breaks a little bit, just a little bit. I begin to ponder what happened to this generation, I don't know.