Stephen Bayley Quotes

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.

Men knew little, formerly, of what was passing beyond ... their own immediate neighborhood, but now, through the ... newspapers ... town and country, state and nation, and the most distant parts of the world are brought together, and whatever is new, rare and important, is conveyed with rapidity to every reader ... set forth in the most succinct manner, and in a style adapted to the comprehension of all.

Globalization cannot take shape without the speed of light.

Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire--not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

Today's China is not in the least shut out from the rest of the world. Trends come to us from all over the world. And the Internet is really developed in China. We get news from all over the world.

Young people are better educated. They grew up in a society which is well connected, well informed. They are able to communicate to one another, to know what is happening.

The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing.

Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press.

Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.

The Internet is truly God's gift to the Chinese people.

Futurism: This was a movement of intellectuals who wanted to replace tradition with the modern world of machinery, speed, violence, and public relations. It proves that we should be careful what intellectuals wish for, because we might get it.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Globalization was a deep trend pushed by technology and right ideas, as much as anything else.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

We have collapsed distances, taken down walls, and spread information.

You can't stop globalization any more than you can stop computers.

Globalization is the speed of light.

There were no bubbles before there were media.

When the government handed over the running of the Internet backbone to commercial Internet providers, it was the largest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet.

The railway, the steamship, and there telegraph are rapidly mobilizing the people of the earth. The nations are coming our of their isolation, and distances which separated the different races are rapidly giving way before the extension of communication.

We are open to the world; the world is at our doorstep. It washes in, not just through the windows, but we are immersed in it completely - through the Internet, through the media, through people traveling, coming here, as well as Singaporeans going abroad.